Many small towns have a native son or daughter who hit the big time after they got the itch and left. But there is only one that can claim to have given humanity perhaps the most towering creative genius who ever lived.
Welcome to Vinci. Birthplace of Leonardo, as in the one and only Leonardo da Vinci -- painter, sculptor, architect, musician, engineer, inventor, scientist, military strategist, botanist, anatomist and doodler.
No one else from Vinci ever became famous, but then again, how many world-class geniuses can a town of 14,000 handle?
The sleepy Tuscan hill town just north of Florence is celebrating Leonardo with an expansion of its Leonardiano Museum. But you won't see the Mona Lisa, not even a copy.
The museum is heaven on earth not just for thinkers but for tinkerers, a shrine to the first high priest of do-it-yourself.
It is home to gadgets of greatness that the Renaissance master, who lived from 1452 to 1519, designed in his sketchbooks but were not or could not be constructed for centuries.
And the main attraction these days is Leonardo's automobile. Its concept is believed to be history's first for a self-propelled vehicle.
Leonardo drew the vehicle in about 1478, 431 years before Henry Ford's Model T rolled off the assembly line in a place called Detroit on a continent that Columbus had yet to put on the map.
"As Leonardo became older, he dedicated more time to mechanical sketches and doodles than to art," said Romano Nanni, the museum's director.
Leonardo also "doodled" a helicopter, a submarine, a tank, a robot, a parachute, a suspension bridge, a mechanical calculator and many other inventions that did not see the light of day until centuries later.
On a recent sweltering day, Mr. Nanni, along with Vinci's mayor, Dario Parrini, and a host of workers were scrambling to get the new pavilion ready for its opening night.
The car, unveiled this year in Florence, is the star.
It looks like a cross between a western wagon with no cover, the innards of a giant wristwatch and a cannon cart -- with a dash of a lunar rover module thrown in.
"We think Leonardo probably designed it to move according to a preset course at a royal court, perhaps to cause a sensation for a visiting king from outside Italy," Mr. Nanni said.
Girolamo Calvi, an Italian academic and trailblazer in modern Leonardo studies, discovered the drawings of the vehicle in 1905 on page 812 R of the Codex Atlanticus.
(The Codex was called Atlanticus because sculptor Pompeo Leoni collated and glued the drawings onto large sheets of map-making paper at the end of the 16th century. By then Europeans had discovered that the Atlantic Ocean had another side to it.) For decades, scholars and engineers theorized about how the car might work and built several models.
But each raised the question of what propelled it. Earlier models that were based on assumptions that it was propelled by leaf springs only fuelled more frustration. The leaf springs turned out to be part of the steering system.
It was not until about 1975 that Italian Professor Carlo Pedretti deduced that sketches of coiled springs in other parts of the Codex may have been intended for the automobile.
He determined that Leonardo planned to put the springs in two closed wooden drums underneath the surface of the automobile and when wound, they transmitted energy to the wheels via a complex series of wooden gears and steel plates.
He teamed up with American robotics expert Mark Rosheim to create the model, built by a team headed by Paolo Galluzzi at Florence's Institute and Museum of History and Science.
The museum is a fitting garage for the wheels of the man who painted for popes in his spare time, but it holds much more that can get today's mechanical dreamers cranked up with inspiration.
Its new extension also includes a machine called the "goldbeater," which Leonardo designed to make gold leaf or thread for brocades or to decorate ornate picture frames.
A bar of gold about 10 centimetres high and 35 cm long is placed under a protective sheath of leather while a heavy iron weight controlled by gears pounds it rhythmically from left to right. The basic concept is still used in machines today.
"Because the drawing of the 'goldbeater' appears often in the Codex, we suspect that Florentine jewellers may have commissioned Leonardo to dream up a machine to make their work easier," said Rosi Fontana, a museum spokeswoman.
"Those were economic boom times in the Florence area and everyone seemed to want a brocade or gold leaf just like when in the 1950s everyone wanted a refrigerator," she said.
Leonardo did not foresee the refrigerator. But he did tinker with the concept of solar energy to heat water with mirrors. It is another of his doodles.