The visit then continues through the Conti Guidi Castle, where over 60models of Leonardo’s machines are on show. The ground floor exhibitions includethe sections devoted toarchitecture, civil engineering and war machines,including Leonardo’s studies on techniques for casting artillery. The model ofthe large articulated wing frames the Gallery housing the section on flight andthat on mechanisms and tools. On the first floor the Sala dei Podestà housesthe imposing model of the lantern crane with a revolving platform and two wholesections are devoted to Optics and movement over land and water, withparticular reference to navigating rivers.

The guided route ends in the video room, fitted withmodels of the solids designed by Leonardo for Luca Pacioli’s De Divina Proportione, and wheredocumentaries on the life and works of Leonardo are shown continuously and with the stunning view that you enjoy from thepanoramic terrace on the top of the tower of the Conti Guidi Castle. 

La tariffa della visita guidata non comprende il costo dei biglietti d'ingresso al Museo Leonardiano, per calcolarlo vedi Orari e Tariffe 

Through a series of hands-on experiments, children experience a new way of looking at reality using the same attentive and curious gaze as Leonardo. Through this, the cultural environment in which Leonardo lived emerges, and Leonardo is no longer seen as the genius who was so far ahead of his time, but as a product of his time, and an interpretative framework is proposed, through which his technological studies (which are the main focus of the Leonardo Museum) are intertwined with his interest for nature, science and art.

The children are stimulated by a team game to analyse some of Leonardo’s drawings according to a particular gaze: artistic, scientific or technical. The ideas the children themselves come up with are the starting point for practical experience, hands-on experiments and exercises, such as drawing a perfect spiral, reproducing a mini-tornado, designing the wings for a flying machine or painting with the sfumato technique.  

Il laboratorio ha un costo di € 3.00 p.p. non comprensivi del biglietto d'ingresso al Museo Leonardiano ( vedi Orari e Tariffe ).
Nel caso in cui si intenda visitare il Museo, è a disposizione il conveniente biglietto cumulativo Laboratorio + Ingresso al Museo al costo di € 5.00 (bambini fino a 14 anni) oppure € 6.50(ragazzi maggiori di 14 anni e adulti). 

We know from old documents that a building, which already existed on this spot in 1427, passed into the hands of the notary Ser Piero, Leonardo’s father, in 1482 and remained da Vinci property until 1629: the family crest is still on the front of the house today.

After changing hands several times, the building was donated to the Municipality of Vinci in 1950 and, after being restored, was inaugurated on April 15 1952. In 1986, the programme for the renovation and restructuring of ‘Leonardo’s places’, sponsored by the town council and executed to a project by the architect Fausto Colombo, brought the restoration of the inside of the building and a new layout of the ground area outside the house.

The inside houses a permanent educational exhibition with reproductions of drawings depicting views of the Tuscan countryside and a map of the Arno valley drawn by Leonardo da Vinci.

The scenic square behind the entrance to the castle is home to Mario Ceroli’s large wooden sculpture (1987) which interprets and visualizes the image of Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man. Close by, opening onto Piazza dei Guidi, which has been redesigned to a plan by Mimmo Paladino, is the entrance to the Leonardo Museum, which is spread over the two buildings of Palazzina Uzielli and the Conti Guidi Castle.

The itinerary inside the boundary of the old town walls has two more places to visit: the church of Santa Croce (the Holy Cross) with the old baptismal font where it is thought Leonardo was christened, and the Leonardo library, a documentation centre specializing in da Vinci’s work and which holds a facsimile reproduction of all Leonardo’s manuscripts and drawings, as well as all the printed editions of his works.

The tour ends with some buildings which bear witness to the ties Leonardo’s family had with Vinci and, in the central Piazza della Libertà, the bronze equestrian statue by the sculptress Nina Akamu (1997). 

 

Starting from his study of light and shade, which led Leonardo to investigate the properties of light, the phenomena of reflection and refraction are examined and, consequently, the eye and the mechanism of sight. Finally, attention is drawn to the link between the study of optics and that of perspective, through guided activities on the experimental method of the camera obscura and the spectrograph built by Leonardo himself. 

La tariffa della visita guidata non comprende il costo dei biglietti d'ingresso al Museo Leonardiano, per calcolarlo vedi Orari e Tariffe

This picturesque path partially follows an ancient link between Vinci and Santa Lucia a Paterno, which also included the hamlet of Anchiano. The existence of that path, probably used for agricultural purposes, is documented at least from the late XVI Century in some papers drawn up by the Captains of the Guelph party and kept in Florence State Archives.
This walk allows one to immerse oneself in that same unspoilt nature which evoked in Leonardo curiosity, love and devotion from when he was still a boy, and it ends with a visit to the house in Leonardo’s birthplace, Anchiano, a typical XV Century farmhouse of the Tuscan countryside, where Leonardo’s birth was traditionally attested on April 15 1452

 

Following da Vinci’s example, they are asked to temporarily become engineers fascinated by the idea of designing machines to help people carry out their practical everyday activities with the least possible effort: a helical gear, an inverted screw, a ball-bearing for conical vertical axes, a paddle-boat.

The workshop leader guides the youngsters through the observation of some of Leonardo’s drawings and notes and consequently, in their search for the proper technical solutions for putting the machines together and their correct functioning. Explanation of the theory, direct observation of the models and a practice-based approach constitute the learning stages which Leonardo himself followed, as he claimed that sapientia (knowledge) is the daughter ofsperientia (experience).  

TheCD-rom Leonardo’s bridges, on theother hand, is about three bridges designed by Leonardo (the self-supporting bridge,the swing bridge and the retractable bridge), devised to satisfy both civilianand military requirements, and which still amaze us with their modernity andthe technological solutions chosen.

By using multimedia supports, then, we can look at the details of thefascinating three-dimensional reconstructions both of Leonardo’s drawings andof his technological plans in motion, in order to better understand how theywork.

Hence the codices and notebooks that the Master filled with drawings and notes written in his unmistakeable reverse handwriting, reading from right to left, make up such a broad and heterogeneous corpus that none other can compare with it in reach and level of inventiveness, especially if one considers that it is reckoned that the material which has reached us and is today held in many collections the world over constitutes barely a fifth of all the Leonardo material, the rest of which has been lost.

Using a series of images and the opportunity to take a look at the facsimiles of the codices kept in the Biblioteca Leonardiana library, we give an overview of the complex, convoluted and fascinating adventures that this priceless heritage was subjected to following the death of Leonardo in Amboise, France, in 1519 and its subsequent inevitable dispersal. But the main feature of this talk is the illustration of the contents and subjects covered, codex by codex.  

La tariffa della visita guidata non comprende il costo dei biglietti d'ingresso al Museo Leonardiano, per calcolarlo vedi Orari e Tariffe

 

the house in Anchiano where he was born, the baptismal font in the Church of Santa Croce (the Holy Cross), the Conti Guidi Castle, the water courses, the land and the mills, the rugged landscape of Montalbano, on which Leonardo often exercised his exceptional gifts for drawing, planning and studying, including the study of fossils. Places which also tell us of his relationships with his grandfather Antonio da Vinci, his uncle Francesco, his father ser Piero, and the probable visits to his mother Caterina.

At the end of the lesson, we highlight the more recent memorials through which Vinci has chosen to render homage to its most illustrious citizen and which offer the whole international community the chance to reflect on the heritage of Leonardo: first and foremost, the Leonardo Museum, and its access route consisting of Mimmo Paladino’s square; then the Leonardo Library, Mario Ceroli’s monument and the equestrian statue by Nina Akamu.

And so, inaddition to recounting the events surrounding them, the techniques and stylesused in some of the most famous masterpieces in Italian art history areexamined: from the Florentine paintings of his youth of the Annunciation and the Adoration of the Magi, to those datingfrom his first period in Milan (suffice it to mention the fresco of The Last Supper in the refectory of SantaMaria delle Grazie), to the renowned “lost” decoration in the Salone deiCinquecento in Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, to the equally famous paintings ofthe Mona Lisa and the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, whichare now in the Louvre. The study of Leonardo’s life and artistic career comesto an end in Francewhere, in the service of King Francis I with the title of first court painter,architect and engineer, he lived out the last years of his life in Alboise, upuntil his death in his house in Clos Lucé on May 2^nd 1519. 

La tariffa della visita guidata non comprende il costo dei biglietti d'ingresso al Museo Leonardiano, per calcolarlo vedi Orari e Tariffe

The session starts by analysing the physiognomic representation of Leonardo by examining the portraits genre. Some prototype drawings are investigated (such as the very well-known presumed Self-portrait belonging to the Biblioteca Reale in Turin) and paintings which, over the course of the centuries, and meeting with alternating favour, were chosen to represent the image of the artist.

The next part shows the works produced between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth Century to illustrate the most significant events in Leonardo’s life: his death, his painting of the Mona Lisa and his activities at the Milanese court of Ludovico il Moro.

Finally, since Leonardo more than any other artist has been interpreted over the course of the centuries as the prototype of genius, an account is given of his posthumous apotheosis in the solemn universe of History’s great figures, grouped together to represent the absolute and perennial values attached to the progress of humanity. 

La tariffa della visita guidata non comprende il costo dei biglietti d'ingresso al Museo Leonardiano, per calcolarlo vedi Orari e Tariffe