Clos Lucé — Leonardo da Vinci's Last Home
Just a five-minute walk from the château, the rose-brick manor of Clos Lucé is where François I installed Leonardo da Vinci in 1516, giving him the title 'First Painter, Engineer and Architect to the King.' The house and its sprawling park feel intimate and genuinely moving in a way that larger châteaux rarely do.
Inside the Manor
The ground-floor rooms are furnished as they would have been in Leonardo's time, with reproduction paintings, anatomical sketches and period furniture that conjure the polymath's daily life with surprising vividness.
The basement houses a permanent exhibition of 40 full-scale machines built from Leonardo's own notebook drawings — flying machines, a proto-tank, a swing bridge — all constructed by IBM engineers in the 1980s. Children and adults alike find it genuinely mind-blowing.
The Renaissance Garden Park
The 7-hectare park behind the manor is dotted with life-size interactive models of Leonardo's inventions, set among ancient cedar trees, a mill pond and kitchen gardens planted with 16th-century varieties of herbs and vegetables.
Picnic tables are scattered throughout, making it one of the best spots in Amboise to slow down and linger. In spring the wisteria on the manor's façade blooms in cascading purple — an unmissable photo opportunity.
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