Official Information
Official website: https://museoleonardodavincifirenze.com/
Online tickets: via https://www.tripadvisor.it/Attraction_Review-g187895-d2242695-Reviews-Museo_Leonardo_Da_Vinci-Florence_Tuscany.html
Address: Via del Castellaccio 1r, 50123 Firenze (FI), Italy
Map: View on Google Maps
Opening Hours
According to the museum, generally open every day. Approximately 09:30–19:30 from April to October and about 10:00–19:00 from November to March, with last entry around one hour before closing and occasional holiday variations. Always confirm on the official site or by phone before your visit.
This private Leonardo da Vinci Museum in the historic centre of Florence focuses on one thing above all: turning the drawings in Leonardo’s notebooks into full-scale, touchable machines. Located a short walk from the Duomo and San Lorenzo, it is an easy, family-friendly stop that balances hands-on fun with genuine educational value. The core of the museum is a series of rooms filled with wooden models built from Leonardo’s codices: flying machines, bridges, gears, cranes, war devices and ingenious mechanisms that explore principles of motion and force. Many of these models are interactive, clearly marked with signs inviting you to turn cranks, lift weights or move parts to see how the underlying physics works. For children and teenagers, this makes the visit feel more like an exploratory playground than a traditional gallery, while adults can appreciate the clarity with which complex mechanical ideas are made visible. Alongside the machines, panels and reproductions of drawings explain the original sketches and show how faithfully the artisans have translated them into three dimensions. Some sections focus on specific themes such as flight, hydraulics or military engineering, while others highlight Leonardo’s anatomical studies and his interest in proportion and geometry. The museum also offers educational workshops and activities, especially for school groups, which delve into topics like levers and pulleys or the science behind arches and domes. The overall visit is relatively short, many people spend about an hour, but dense with stimuli. It is fully indoors, so useful for hot or rainy days, and centrally located enough to slot between major sights. Compared with the more academic Leonardo museums in Vinci, this space is unapologetically interactive and tourist-oriented, but it stays grounded in Leonardo’s authentic drawings and in the long Tuscan tradition of fine woodworking. For travellers who like to understand how things work, or who are visiting Florence with curious kids, it is an engaging way to make one of the Renaissance’s most famous figures feel concrete rather than abstract.