Vita gazette – New documents shed light on the identity of Leonardo da Vinci’s mother, of whom practically nothing was known until today. Adventurers, prostitutes, pirates, enslaved people, knights, gentlewomen, peasants, soldiers, and notaries. Their stories go back from Vinci to Florence, Venice to Constantinople, and the Black Sea to the wild highlands of the Caucasus.

Refugee, an enslaved person, an exile for the Mediterranean. This is how Leonardo da Vinci’s mother is described in the historical novel signed by Carlo Vecce. The Italianist, a university professor at the Orientale of Naples, narrates the life of Caterina in a book that is also based on multiple discoveries of a scientific nature, on the discovery of documents capable of rewriting, in fact, the story of the origin of the genius.

A swamp at the mouth of the Don River on the Sea of ​​Azov. One morning in July. A girl is dragged off her land, enslaved, sold and resold as a human trafficker’s thing. When she arrives in our country, she is at the lowest rung of the social and human ladder, without a voice or dignity. They stole everything from her, her body, her dreams, and her future, but she will be more robust: she will suffer, fight, love, give her life, and regain her freedom.

The hitherto unknown document that Carlo Vecce found in the State Archives of Florence is the deed of the liberation of the enslaved person Caterina by her mistress, Monna Ginevra, who had rented her out as a wet nurse two years earlier to a Florentine knight. The notary Piero da Vinci: Leonardo’s father signed the document.

How did Caterina arrive in Florence? Thanks to her mistress’s husband: an old Florentine adventurer named Donato, who had already emigrated to Venice, where he had slave girls from the Levant, the Black Sea and the Tana at his service. Before dying in 1466, Donato left his money to the tiny convent of San Bartolomeo a Monteoliveto, outside Porta San Frediano, to construct the family chapel and her burial site. The trusted notary is always him, Piero. And Leonardo executed his first work precisely for that church: the Annunciation.