Museum of Weapons

The town of Torre Annunziata, 20 km south east of Naples on the River Sarno became the site of the principal armaments works of the Kingdom of Naples in 1753. Luigi Vanvitelli (1700-73) designed the water-power system and the buildings were laid out by his pupil Francesco Sabatini, with a palazzo-style block set in a courtyard. A gunpowder works was operated on the site in the 1830s by William Robinson, a Scots officer in the Neapolitan navy. The buildings that remain include a foundry and a machine shop with cast-iron columns. Part of the site is occupied by a museum of armaments displaying many guns made on the site. Torre Annunziata, only 5 km from Pompeii, was built on the ruins of the ancient city of Oplontis, and the preserved Villa of Poppea, destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD is part of the Pompeii and Herculaneum World Heritage Site, designated in 1997.