This summer, at long last, I made it to Vinci. Yes, that Vinci where Leonardo grew up. In the castle which looks out over gentle Tuscan hills, green with olive groves and vines, there’s a dedicated museum with some astonishing exhibits. There are flying machines, a ‘car’, clocks, and all kinds of contraptions which work by clever and innovative use of screws, levers, gears and pulleys. Shown alongside are Leonardo’s extraordinary, intricate technical drawings – multi-perspective, zoom-to-detail, his famous backward-slanting mirror-writing with his explanatory notes about design and dynamics. These are the machines, now built for real, he dreamed of five hundred years ago.