Museo Leonardiano, Vinci

About this place

Da Vinci was never a surname. It was an address: Leonardo, son of Ser Piero, from the town of Vinci. This small hill town thirty-odd kilometres west of Florence is the only place on earth his name actually belongs to. The Museo Leonardiano here owns not a single painting by his hand and not one original sheet from his notebooks, and it does not pretend otherwise. What it owns instead is more than sixty models in wood, rope and brass, built from the 1950s onward out of his drawings and arranged across a dozen or so sections, each one standing beside an enlarged reproduction of the page it came from. That pairing is the whole point: you see the line he drew, then the machine he meant, and for once you understand what the man was actually thinking rather than admiring him from a distance. The collection is split between two neighbouring buildings in the middle of town. The Palazzina Uzielli holds the building machinery, the textile devices, the clocks and the anatomy rooms; the medieval Castello dei Conti Guidi, all bare stone, holds the flight studies, the war engines, the water machines and the optical instruments. Climb the castle tower before you leave: it opens an hour after the museum, at 10:30, shuts in bad weather and costs you about a hundred and twenty steps, but the terrace looks out over vines and olive terraces all the way to the horizon, which is more or less what a fifteenth-century boy was staring at while trying to work out how birds stay up. The museum alone takes ninety minutes to two hours; the full circuit with the birthplace runs closer to three. On priorities, let us be blunt. If you have two days in Florence, this is not your day. The Uffizi, the Accademia and the Duomo dome deserve that time, they book out weeks ahead, and nothing here replaces them. Vinci is a second-visit trip, or a trip for someone travelling with a teenager who would rather look at a machine than another gold altarpiece. Do not confuse it with the Museo Galileo in central Florence, which holds genuine historic instruments made by their own makers rather than modern reconstructions; and do not confuse it with the small commercial Leonardo museums in the city centre that show broadly similar models, usually for less. The difference is that this is his actual town, and what surrounds the building is Tuscan hillside rather than a street of souvenir stalls. Getting here without a car is doable but it is not a stroll: a train from Florence to Empoli takes about half an hour, then bus line 49 on to Vinci takes another half hour, running roughly hourly on weekdays and dropping to a handful of runs on Sundays and holidays. Budget an hour and a half each way and check the last return before you set off. It suits children well — many of the models are built to be cranked and tried, and there is nothing distressing anywhere in it. The town is small and gently sloped but entirely walkable, and its restaurants are plain Tuscan family places: do not count on a halal kitchen in Vinci or on a prayer room, so plan a fish or vegetarian lunch and arrange prayers around the journey rather than around the town. As for the presumed birth house at Anchiano, three kilometres uphill, it is a near-empty stone farmhouse with a lovely view: take it if your day is long, and skip it without regret if it is not.