“Leonardo: the gift of the vineyard” opens in Vinci.

Leonardo through the centuries: an interactive exhibition

Throughout the centuries, the figure of Leonardo da Vinci has never ceased to fascinate. In addition to being an inventor, scientist and artist, the Tuscan Genius was also a lover of good drinking, a forerunner agronomist and oenologist, so much so that he defined wine as “divine licor of grapes.”
The exhibition Leonardo: The Gift of the Vineyard, located in an ancient gallery that housed a wine museum in the 19th century, recounts precisely Leonardo’s passion for viticulture, in an enveloping atmosphere full of multimedia suggestions.

The itinerary boasts the scientific advice of Prof. Attilio Scienza and spans the Tuscan experience of Leonardo’s younger years and his 1502 trip to Romagna, where he tasted local wines and designed refined winemaking techniques. In Romagna, Leonardo drew two bunches of grapes with the well-known “Uve Portate a Cesena“: the only sketch of the grape fruit that has come down to us, digitized and displayed in the exhibition.
It will continue with an account of the Milanese years at the court of Ludovico il Moro, who gave Leonardo a hectare of vineyard- the remains of which are part of the exhibition-as a reward for the realization of the Last Supper. Testifying to Leonardo’s pioneering vision and the subject of the exhibition is the text of the letter sent in 1515 by the Genius to his factor in Fiesole, in which he complains about the wine he received in Milan, identifying the wrong winemaking methods as the reasons for the product’s poor performance.

Leonardo: The Gift of the Vineyard is produced by Leonardo da Vinci Spa, in collaboration with Giunti Editore, a historic Florentine publishing house that has been engaged for more than half a century in a project of popularizing and reproducing Leonardo’s codices.