Museo delle reali ferriere borboniche, Mongiana

The Museum of the Royal Bourbon Ironworks, or MUFAR, is a museum of industrial archaeology in the town of Mongiana, Calabria, which opened on October 23, 2013 and focuses on the history of the Mongiana iron and steel hub created during the Bourbon reign between the 18th and 19th centuries.

In 1872, when steelmaking activities ceased for good due to lack of orders, the industrial buildings were gradually abandoned. Resold in the late 19th century, they became housing and warehouses.

Among them, the former Mongiana Arms Factory, rediscovered in the late 1970s in a state of complete disrepair, has undergone a thorough restoration process. In October 2013, architectural restoration was completed with the setting up of the Royal Bourbon Ironworks Museum.

The project was handled by RA Consulting srl, coordinated by architect Gennaro Matacena.

The museographic layout is flexible and articulated, with interactive digital installations, and is developed as an engaging narrative of the "Mongiana Story": iron mining, motive power, forests and coal, viability, technologies and productions, and the working-class condition.

Multimedia stations complement the exhibition by documenting Calabria's still little-known industrial history, which especially in the 19th century developed in the processing of the region's natural products, such as silk, licorice, tuna, cannamela, and bergamot.

Architecturally interesting is the front with a cast-iron entablature and, in the entrance hall, a serliana formed by two columns plus two 2.40-meter-high half-columns, also made of cast iron.

The Arms Factory constitutes one of the earliest records of the use of cast iron in construction in Italy.

The front, with the entablature made entirely of cast iron, consists of two imposing columns, as high as 4.80 meters, and the historiated lintel.

Two columns and four half-columns still made of cast iron, half as tall as the outer ones, make up a "space-like" serliana