Casa Azul, the house Frida Kahlo was born in and died in

The house on the corner of Londres and Allende in Coyoacán, Mexico City was built by Guillermo Kahlo in 1904. His daughter Frida was born there in 1907, and she died there in 1954, in a bed she had rigged with a mirror in the canopy so she could paint herself while lying down.

Between those dates the house absorbed an extraordinary amount of life. She and Diego Rivera painted the walls cobalt blue and ochre. They kept spider monkeys, hairless dogs and parrots in the courtyard. Leon Trotsky lived in a room off that courtyard for two years after fleeing Stalin, and the affair between him and Frida happened within those walls before he moved a few streets away and was murdered.

The kitchen is yellow and blue with small clay cups spelling out two names on the wall. The studio still holds her wheelchair pulled up to an easel, brushes in a jar, an unfinished portrait of Stalin.

After she died, Rivera closed one bathroom, filled it with her clothes, letters, medicines, jewelry, plaster corsets and photographs, and gave instructions that it not be opened for fifteen years after his own death. It stayed sealed for fifty. When conservators finally went in during 2004 they found more than 6,000 photographs and 300 garments, including the corsets she painted while wearing them.

The exhibition made from that bathroom changed how the world understood her, because it made the pain physical. There is a prosthetic leg with a red leather boot and embroidered bells on it. She designed it herself.

The house opened as a museum in 1958 and remains one of the most visited in Mexico. Tickets sell out days ahead. The blue is repainted regularly, and it is exactly right.