Arcobaleno d'Estate: a genius tour

A genius tour! On June 21st on the occasion of the event Toscana Arcobaleno d'Estate, the association of tourist guides Turislucca proposes a visit to the city in the footsteps of the genius of Leonardo in the year dedicated to Leonardo da Vinci.

A guided tour inside the city walls and its genius. A leap in time and space and among the many disciplines in which the people of Lucca have been, in their own way, "brilliant".

a musician

That Giacomo Puccini was a motoring enthusiast is not a new story. The "genius" of world opera music, a great lover of cars, began his "automobile career" by purchasing, in 1900, a De Dion-Bouton 5 HP, seen at the Milan Exposition of that year, followed by a Fiat 60, a Clement 14/22 HP, an Isotta Fraschini, a Labuire, an Atala, a new Fiat 501, a Lancia Trikappa and, a few months before his death, he was given the very modern and very expensive Lancia Lambda, with which he made his last journey, on 4 November 1924, to Pisa station and, from there, by train to Brussels, where he underwent the fatal throat operation.

two scientists

This passion of his would never have been born without the genius of two other people from Lucca, Father Eugenio Barsanti and Eng. Felice Matteucci, who began working together to create an engine more practical than the steam engine, and in 1853 they designed the internal combustion engine, with internal combustion, and deposited a memory to protect the ownership of the invention at the Georgofili Academy. In 1854 in London they obtained the first certification, followed by patents in several European countries. Here it will be possible to see the reproduction of the first machinery that gave rise to the most widespread means of locomotion such as the automobile today. Thanks to them the first impulse was given to the automobile industry. And the passion of Giacomo Puccini.

a dreamer

Genius the construction of the Urban Walls, one of the most important experiments in Italian military engineering since the fifteenth century and brilliant the airman Vincenzo Lunardi inventor of the first balloon that had ever flown over the skies of Tuscany in 1788. How did it end?

many sculptors

Genius the facade of the Church of San Michele which, at the beginning of the 13th century, described in a cryptic way the evolution of the human element towards purification thanks to complex mathematical and ingenious answers the painting in the Church of San Paolino which, in the 15th century, depicted the new techniques of mathematical-geometric perspective.

merchants and weavers

Ingenious technical-surgical skills already present in the 11th century and the industrial technology that, even before, made Lucca a Silk Valley of the Middle Ages: the only European city able to weave the precious thread that came from the East.
But this is another story.

info and reservations turislucca@turislucca.com

(credits R. Giomi - A. Giusti - www.barsantiematteucci.it )