Museum of Leonardo da Vinci’s Working Machines

Located in the historic Scoletta di San Rocco, the museum features working models of Leonardo’s machines, anatomical studies, and high-resolution reproductions of his paintings, offering an engaging experience for all ages.

Planning your visit

Leonardo left thousands of pages of drawings and built very few of the machines in them, which is what these museums exist to correct: working models constructed from his notebooks, at scale, that visitors can operate.

The Venice museum occupies the Scoletta di San Rocco, a sixteenth-century confraternity building beside the far grander Scuola Grande di San Rocco with its Tintoretto cycle. Inside are the flying machines, the gears and hoists, the war engines, the hydraulic devices, and reproductions of the anatomical studies — which were centuries ahead of the medicine of his time and went unpublished for three hundred years.

High-resolution reproductions of the paintings complete it, the originals being scattered across the world.

Venice makes a certain sense as a location given Leonardo's hydraulic interests, though his connection to the city was brief.

It sits in San Polo. Allow an hour. The main booking is an entry ticket. Current availability is listed below.