Leonardo
As I already wrote in one of the posts, recently I have been to Venice with my mom. We were just wandering around the city with no certain goal – it’s not very productive, but we thought that running around on fire and searching for some things to remember isn’t a very good way to spend the weekend. Especially when you’re in Venice. I mean everybody knows it as a city made of tiny islands, hundreds of bridges and gondolas, but what historical meaning is there, significant museums and stuff, well, I knew nothing (I am a bit ashamed of myself) except for this piazza something that is always shown in the movies with tons of doves flying over cafés with beautiful women in sunglasses and light skirts. And it was almost as expected, except for the dove over cafés, it was raining cats and dogs, pretty cold, still magical.
When we arrived at the hotel a lovely gentlemen gave us a map of Venice right away and pointed out some significant places like the biggest church, the oldest church, a church with some arts and another church. And a palace. That’s it. I think I already said somewhere or to someone that Rome is a city where there’s more churches than coffee places? Well, that’s like all of Italy and the most touristic place on earth is not an exception. To my surprise a lot of churches hold some exhibitions. One of them has already appeared in this lovely blog – the one with the collection of music instruments. But this one is really something. I don’t know why, but I always had a feeling that crazy inventions and Catholicism aren’t friends, burning on stakes and stuff, but I guess now things are way better.
So one day we were wandering through the smallest streets I’ve ever seen and suddenly we ran into this church Chiesa di San Barnaba in Venezia, and on the porch of this church we found a very weird thing that looked like artificial wings. That rang a bell, we thought – why not check it out? So there we were, amazed by Leonardo’s inventions reconstructed from his sketches, and it was awesome!
A little bit about the exhibition:
An exhibition shows over 60 models of Leonardo Codes – sketches of Leonardo’s inventions of machines that make people fly or walk on water, these machines were made by masters of crafts and people with good hands. The exhibition is divided into 4 thematic sections – war; flight; water and mechanics; construction. Almost all of the models are made of wood, some are large, some small, some you can touch, others you can’t, but those functioning (nearly all of them) are exceptional! Leonardo designed many machines: the bicycle, the Archimedes screw, helical gear, hang gliding device, glider and many other war machines. There are also many models ow weapons of war: fist weapons, cannons, bridges .. well, pretty much everything! Every exhibit has an explanation right next to it, so if you look closely you will be able to understand how it works. I’m not that familiar to this side of Leonardo, I am not sure if all or part of his inventions was really used in life and which were successful and which weren’t but anyway the exhibition is amazing. Walking through all this things make you realize that something really creepy was going on in his head and how inspiring the world mu have seen to him. It is unbelievable how many ideas he had and how creative his mind was.
I have made some pictures (including my Mom testing out something I have no idea what), enjoy!
