Every year the School Leonardo da Vinci in Florence, leader in the field of Italian language teaching for foreigners, offers a rich programme full of courses of any kind, which introduce students in a complete study of Italian culture and language.

But for the year 2009, our school has enriched its calendar with some new special courses. The brand new courses of this year are “La Dolce Vita” and “Professional Italian Cooking Courses”, two young courses thought for young students who come from all over the world, whose desire is to learn Italian language and culture in a special way. (more…)

by Vicente Alfonso

Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man teaches us how to achieve some of Leonardo’s greatest qualities. It teaches us how to balance our lives, and thereby, become more whole human beings.

Leonardo embodied the qualities of indivisible wholeness suggested by his Vitruvian Man. He was the consummate scientist (Da Vinci Man in the square) and artist (Da Vinci Man in the circle) of his time. (more…)

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Leonardo da Vinci was born in 1492 at a Tuscan farmhouse in Anchiano, Italy, near the town of Vinci where he spent most of his childhood. He was the son of Ser Piero and a girl called Caterina who worked for him. After Leonardo was born, the father and mother did not remain together. Only recently have details of Leonardo’s birth mother come to light. In 2002, Alessandro Vezzosi, Director of the Leonardo da Vinci Museum in Vinci, Italy, told the press they had found substantial proof Leonardo’s mother was a slave girl and not a peasant girl, as previously believed.(1) Vezzosi went on to report that Leonardo’s father was a craftsman who owned a Middle-Eastern female slave named Caterina. And, according to their discovery, a few months after Caterina gave birth to Leonardo, she was married off to one of the workers. (more…)

More than anyone else, Albert Einstein is the official poster boy for genius. When I ask people for names they associate with the idea of genius, Einstein was always in the top ten, and is usually the ­first.

I’m sure your response is very similar. But how much do you know about what Einstein actually did? (more…)

Cancer history goes way back. The Greek term carcinoma is the medical term for a malignant tumor. Celsus translated carcinos into Latin cancer. He called benign tumors oncos, which is Greek for swelling and malignant tumors carrions. Celsus later added the suffix – oma making the name carcinoma. Treatment then was based on the humor theory of four bodily fluids. The four bodily fluids were black and yellow bile, blood and phlegm. (more…)

Albert Einstein has always been viewed as an eccentric. However, his personal oddities did not, in any way, undermine his brilliance. Despite the way he looked, he is considered one of the most groundbreaking scientists of all time.

For anyone struggling to find success in his or her own field, these Albert Einstein quotes can inspire you to fulfill your dreams. (more…)

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When one thinks of Albert Einstein, many thoughts, phrases, and concepts come to mind. Most often it’s the theory of relativity. He was a German-born theoretical physicist. He is best known for his theory of relativity and specifically mass–energy equivalence, E = mc2. Einstein received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics. But! (more…)

At age 22, young Darwin found an opportunity to sail around the world on board the surveying vessel, the HMS Beagle, as a companion to captain Robert Fitzroy, leaving temporarily aside his education at Christ College, Cambridge.

A journey initially estimated by Fitzroy to last three years, was on its fourth year and had one more to go before the HMS Beagle would return to England in 1836. Five years that would reshape Darwin’s way of understanding natural history, and produce his masterpiece years later, which turned into one of the most revolutionary ideas of human thinking. (more…)

The alchemical period corresponds to the span of human history that preceded the era in which fundamental understanding in the chemical sciences began to be acquired by humankind. Most scholars believe that alchemy had its roots in ancient Egypt. China has also emerged as a possible source of alchemical thought. Thus, alchemy was the practice of chemistry such as it existed over the approximately twenty-five centuries before the time of Robert Boyle (1627–1697) and Antoine Lavoisier (1743–1784), when chemistry began to develop into the science we know today. Alchemy was an early precursor to science and included many of the chemistry-related processes that have become known as the chemical arts—the working of metals and alloys, glassmaking and glass coloring, and the preparation and use of pigments, dyes, and therapeutic agents. (more…)

The example of Blaise Pascal, the famous French mathematician of 17th century, proves that gambling might be not so much a purpose as means. It can be an excellent exercise for mind, as in case with Pascal and another French mathematician – Fermat, who invented calculations, now known to us as theory of probabilities. (more…)