Mona Lisa’s bridge

I sometimes drive over the Buriano Bridge, just outside of Arezzo. It’s a seven-arched, one-lane wonder built in 1277 spanning the Arno. If that isn’t cool enough, the bridge is the one off the Mona Lisa’s shoulder, at least according to Carlo Starnazzi, a University of Florence paleontologist, who published a paper with his research in 1995.

The landscape was widely thought to be Leonardo da Vinci’s fictional creation, but Starnazzi argues that Leonardo had mapped this area extensively when he hired by Cesare Borgia to study how the river might be diverted by water works to starve nearby cities during a siege. On the map he created he’d drawn the Buriano bridge. (A little side note, Borgia was the inspiration for Machiavelli’s The Prince. If the assignment paid well, and used his engineering skills, da Vinci was up for the job, no matter how nasty the employer …)

Starnazzi even found a vantage point—a now abandoned castle—which in Leonardo’s time would have aligned with the geographical features exactly the way they appear in the painting. And Leonardo was a native of Tuscany and knew the area well.

There’s a bit of competition for claiming bits of Italian geography as the inspiration for what’s behind the Mona Lisa. Several other theories place the background in the Italian Alps, in Bobbio, located south of Piacenza, and in Montefeltro in the Marche.

But I am going to believe it it the Buriano Bridge as I pass over it not infrequently and the “evidence” seems pretty good to me. There’s also a sign making the bridge put up by the village … so it must be true. (The bridge is very near Il Borro resort, home of the Pinocchio collection.)