Leonardo da Vinci Interactive Museum

(This is part of our series of posts from our six-week Road Scholar Independent Living and Learning in Florence trip to Italy in Spring 2025. We have an index to all the posts from that trip here.)

Today (June 2) was Italian Republic Day, a national holiday, so we didn’t have language class and many museums were closed. We slept in a bit, met up with friends for lunch, and then sought an escape from the heat and humidity in the air-conditioned Leonardo da Vinci Interactive Museum.

To start the afternoon, we met up with another couple in our Road Scholar group, Jim and Linda, for lunch at a restaurant we’d been wanting to try–Ristorante Del Fagioli.

After lunch, we walked to the north side of Florence’s Centro Storico to visit the Leonardo da Vinci Interactive Museum. Leonardo is considered by many to be the greatest genius in history: one of the most ingenious and prolific minds of the Renaissance, a scientist, inventor, artist, engineer, and anatomist. This is a reproduction of his self-portrait; the original is in the Royal Library of Turin.

Leonardo never actually realized most of the inventions he dreamed up. They existed only as meticulously annotated drawings in his notebooks, or codices. These are reproductions of two of them. Leonardo wrote in a reversed script that is readable only in a mirror.

The Leonardo da Vinci Interactive Museum has brought many of the brilliant man’s inventions to life by building working models of them from Leonardo’s drawings.

There was a nearly life-size reproduction of Leonardo’s famous Vitruvian Man, which was the result of his exhaustive studies and mathematical analysis of the human body.

Leonardo was also fascinated by optics, such as this eight-sided mirrored room that presents views to infinity to anyone inside.