Seven years ago I visited Florence, Italy. It’s a beautiful city, its slender streets packed with history and more scooters than you could shake an expresso at.
It’s also the birthplace of Leonardo Da Vinci.
Da Vinci was an illegitimate child who grew up to be one of the finest minds the world has ever seen. A polymath, adept at art, science and maths, an inventor, a sculptor, a dreamer who wrote backward in his notebooks. There are a few of these loose-leaf treasures that remain and they contain the few clues we have about his life. He painted the most famous portrait in the world, but we know little about him.
This notebook comes from the Leonardo Da Vinci museum. It’s a gorgeous object, hand bound in leather with a old fashioned string tie and an embossed image of Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man on the front.
I doubt I’ll fill this with quite the skill of the grand master, in fact this will probably be one of the few notebooks I’ll never use. It’s just too beautiful for me to write anything in unless it’s the most mind blowing poem in the entirety of time and space. Yeah. I’ll get right on that…
If you’re interested in learning more about Leonardo, then I’d recommend Charles Nicholl’s biography “Leonardo Da Vinci: The Flights of The Mind”. There’s a heavy focus on his artistic endeavors, at the expense of his scientific work, but it’s still an illuminating and well-researched book.
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