Tuesday, November 20

Today I went out to the little Tuscan hill town of Vinci. To get there you take a regional train to the town of Empoli then a bus to Vinci. Vinci is, of course, the birthplace of Leonardo da Vinci and the town is very proud of it's famous son.

The house that is reputed to be his birthplace has been restored to it's original appearance in that era and a very slick multimedia presentation lets you get a feel for what inspired Leonardo to paint. However, having seen the landscape around Vinci it's not hard to see where he got his original inspiration (his first sketches were of the views he saw from a nearby hill, which you can still see). It's actually not certain if Leonardo was born in this house. It was in the Da Vinci family for over 150 years but was not bought by his father until some years later. Also, his parents never married, and both went on to marry others, so legally he was a bastard (OK, illegitimate to use the more PC term but the other term is more historically correct) and it's not even sure that his mother ever lived in the house. What is not uncertain is that he was born in Vinci as he was baptized in the town church and his grandfather made a meticulous record of his birth and baptism. Even after he moved away to Florence and Milan, etc, he still returned periodically while his mother was alive.

Leonardo's Birthplace

The final house is a fusion of two previous structures described as the masters house and the workers house

The kitchen area

You can get to the house in two ways. There is a bus that goes up that way but it has an irregular schedule. The other way is to walk - its only 1.5 km and is known as the "Green Route" as it winds through olive groves on the way. In fact, I encounter a number of people in the groves harvesting olives by hand (see the picture). Did I mention that Vinci is a HILL town - this route emphasizes that as it is nearly all uphill and quite steep in places. But I'm glad I did it as it was nice to walk in the country for a change without a crowd of people. All the following pictures were taken in and around Vinci.

Harvesting olives. After placing a net under the tree, the olives are stripped from the tree using a small rake. each branch is hand stripped after it is inspected to determine how ripe the olives are.

After watching the presentations and taking some pictures of the scenery. I headed back to town where there is a two-part museum. The first part focuses on Vinci and it's history while the second part features Leonardo's machines. By this time I was feeling very run down so I focused on the second part of the museum and Leonardo's engineering designs. The museum has models of the most significant machines based on the writings and diagrams that Leonardo left behind. Some of these are interpretive as Leonardo left some of his diagrams incomplete.

This 3D piece is based on one of Leonardo's studies of human musculature

Leonardo illustrated based is drawings for this model on studies of the articulation of a bird's wing

One of his early ideas for a flying machine

Another model based on a bird's wing

This has often been referred to as the first helicopter but no one knows how it might have worked

An early delta wing design, a for runner of today's hang gliders

One version of a self-propelled cart powered by two springs. Several different versions of this cart have been built as the drawings are incomplete

Bet you didn't know that Leonardo designed a bicycle-neither did anyone else until 1969 when a diagram was discovered on one of two pages that had been glued together by an early conservator of Leonardo's writings. It has all the features of a modern bicycle.

At this point (about 3:00pm) I decided to call it a day as it would take about 1 1/2 hours (with waiting time) to get back to Florence and I wasn't feeling any better.

So, that was today, alight day but enjoyable.