Arsenale di Venezia

This guide to the Arsenale di Venezia traces how this medieval shipyard, once employing some sixteen thousand workers, mass-produced warships on what historians call an assembly line centuries before Henry Ford — famously finishing one for a visiting French king in the time it took him to eat lunch in 1574. It reaches back two centuries earlier to Dante, who toured the yard and folded its fires and boiling pitch into a scene in the Inferno. Look closely at the marble lions guarding the Porta Magna gate — they came from far outside Venice.