Pietrarsa railway museum, Railway museum in Portici, Italy
Pietrarsa is a railway museum in Portici that displays steam engines, diesel railcars and electric trains from different periods of Italian rail history. The collection sits inside large workshop halls where locomotives were once built and repaired.
Ferdinand II founded a royal workshop here in 1840 that produced locomotives for the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. After Italian unification, the site changed hands several times before becoming a museum.
The museum functions as an educational center, offering specialized programs about railway engineering and transportation technology through interactive exhibits and guided tours.
The museum opens Thursday afternoons and on weekends without advance booking, while Wednesday visits need a reservation. The large halls are accessible for wheelchairs, with wide paths between the trains.
The site runs along the first railway line in Italy, which connected Naples with Portici. The outdoor areas hold plants from around the world, originally introduced for technical experiments.
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