The Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci is the largest science and technology museum in Italy and one of the most important institutions of its kind in southern Europe. The museum was founded in 1953 to mark the five-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Leonardo da Vinci and occupies the former sixteenth-century monastery of San Vittore al Corpo in the central Brera district of Milan. The monastery was built in the early sixteenth century as a religious foundation of the Olivetan Benedictine order. The buildings were suppressed during the Napoleonic period and were used through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as military barracks, a prison and a series of municipal storage facilities, before being identified in the late 1940s as a possible site for the new science museum that the Milanese chamber of commerce was promoting. The Leonardo gallery at the centre of the museum displays around sixty wooden reconstructions of machines and inventions documented in the Leonardo notebooks, built by a team of Italian artisans over twenty years and forming the largest dedicated Leonardo machine collection anywhere in the world. The collection covers flying machines, hydraulic engines, mechanical clocks, military engines, civil engineering equipment and a series of more whimsical inventions including a mechanical drum and a self-propelled cart. The transport galleries occupy the various external pavilions of the museum site and contain one of the largest historical transport collections in Europe. The maritime pavilion contains the original conning tower and outer hull of the Italian submarine Enrico Toti, a Cold War Italian Navy submarine launched in 1967 and decommissioned in 1997 before being relocated to the museum on a four-hundred-kilometre overland transport that took six months to complete in 2005. The railway pavilion includes the original locomotive and three carriages of the historic Italian Royal Train, the Milan-Sondrio dynamometer car of 1903 used to measure railway performance, and a vast collection of Italian and European steam, electric and diesel locomotives. The aviation pavilion includes the original training glider used by Italo Balbo for his famous 1933 transatlantic squadron flight and several other major aircraft of the early Italian aviation industry, alongside contemporary spacecraft including a full-scale model of the Mercury capsule used by Alan Shepard for the first American manned space flight in 1961.

Type: Tourist Attraction

Address: Via San Vittore 21, Milan, Italy

Website: https://www.museoscienza.org

Opening Date: 15/02/1953