Where did Leonardo da Vinci grow up and live?

📍Anchiano, Vinci, Tuscany, Italy

“I was born Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci on the 15th of April 1452 in Anchiano, a small hamlet near the town of Vinci in the Tuscan hills. I was the illegitimate son of a Florentine notary and a peasant woman, and my childhood in the farmhouse at Anchiano, surrounded by the Tuscan landscape — the olive groves, the vineyards, the rivers and the light — gave me the first education of the eye that became the foundation of everything. I drew the hills and the water and the flight of birds before I had words for what I was doing. I went to Florence at fourteen to apprentice in Verrocchio's workshop, and from that workshop came painting and sculpture and the insatiable curiosity that filled notebook after notebook with studies of anatomy, hydraulics, flight, and the structure of the natural world.”

👍 LovedThe Tuscan landscape that educated my eye before any teacher did. The Florentine workshop tradition that gave me the technical foundations of art. The freedom that illegitimacy imposed — I had to make my own path entirely.

👎 DislikedThe illegitimacy that prevented me from following my father into the notarial profession. The inability to finish — the dozens of projects begun and abandoned. The sense of time running out against the infinite curiosity.

Map showing where Leonardo da Vinci lived — Anchiano, Vinci, Tuscany, Italy

🗺️ Approximate location today

Street view of Leonardo da Vinci's home at Anchiano, Vinci, Tuscany, Italy

📍 Street view today

Sources: Isaacson, W. Leonardo da Vinci (2017), Simon & Schuster; Kemp, M. Leonardo da Vinci: The Marvellous Works of Nature and Man (1981), Harvard University Press