Rome's little shop of horrors: dolls 'hospital' a tourism draw
For more than 60 years, one family has been nursing broken dolls back to health, writes Gary Jones
Behind the window's dust-dulled glass, unblinking eyes stare from decapitated heads. Severed arms, legs, hands and feet hang in bunches from rusty nails. The little shop of horrors, known locally as the Ospedale delle Bambole, or Rome's "Hospital of the Dolls", was established by the Squatriti family more than six decades ago.
Cracked paint peels from the weathered window frame of the "hospital". Inside, Federico Squatriti, 52, and his 82-year-old mother, Gelsomina, continue a family tradition of nursing broken antique dolls back to health, and paint-spattered walls, cobwebbed shelves and busy workbenches are cluttered with fractured figurines, wounded toy soldiers and mangled puppets.
"It has always been owned by our family, so we haven't changed anything," says Squatriti of his cramped and fascinating atelier, which has become a macabre and offbeat, if largely missed, tourist attraction in recent years.
The ramshackle workshop - a halfway house for refugees from the most sinister of fairy tales - sits just a stroll from the sparkly Gucci, Versace and Dolce & Gabbana boutiques on the Italian capital's swanky Via dei Condotti.
"It looks like an old-fashioned shop because it is an old-fashioned shop," he says. "It's looked the same since the beginning."
