Diego Rivera Mural Museum

This guide to the Diego Rivera Mural Museum in Mexico City opens with a 1985 earthquake that left the grand Hotel del Prado too damaged to stand in, and a Rivera fresco of more than one hundred fifty figures painted straight onto its lobby wall. It follows the engineers who sawed the mural free from the building's skeleton, bolted a steel frame around the slab, and inched it across the street on rollers toward a patch of former parking garage. The museum's doors were built wide enough for that fifteen-and-a-half-meter fresco to pass through only once.