A trail of two artists

Diego Rivera Studio
Built in modernist style in 1934, Rivera and Kahlo lived here during their first marriage.
Calle Diego Rivera, San Angel. Tuesday-Sunday.

Museo Trotsky
Leon Trotsky fetched up in Mexico in 1937. Initially, he, his wife Natalia and small son were guests of Kahlo at the Casa Azul. Trotsky had an extended affair with Kahlo and subsequently moved to a house four blocks away. In May 1940, communist agents, led by Siqueiros, the painter friend of Rivera and Kahlo, fired hundreds of rounds into the bedroom where Trotsky and his wife Natasha were sleeping. Three months later, a second assassination attempt succeeded when a so-called "journalist" smashed Trotsky's head with an ice-axe. The house remains exactly as it was, right down to the bullet holes in the walls.
Avenida Rio Churubusco 410, Coyoac·n. Tuesday-Sunday.

Museo Dolores Olmedo Patiño
Dolores Olmedo met Rivera when, just 11 years old, she was taken by her mother to see him working on the murals at the Public Education Ministry and Rivera asked permission to draw her. "My mother never knew I was posing nude." The resultant lithographs formed the basis of Olmedo's collection of 130 Riveras and 30-odd Kahlos.
Avenida Mexico 5843, Xochimilco. Tuesday-Sunday.

Murals by Rivera
In the Palacio Nacional on the Zócalo and, within a few blocks, the National Preparatory School (calle San Ieronimo), where Rivera first met Kahlo, and the Public Education Secretariat (calle Argentina 28). Nearby, at one end of the Alameda, the Museo Mural Diego Rivera was built to hold Dream of a Sunday Afternoon, rescued from a hotel across the road that was destroyed by earthquake in 1985; at the other end, the Palacio Bellas Artes has a reconstruction of the mural commissioned for the Rockefeller Center in New York but destroyed by Rockefeller himself because it featured communist notables.