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| Chateau Royale Amboise |
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| Stained glass windows in St Hubert Chapel - resting place of Leonardo Da Vinci |
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| Stephen atop Chateau Royale with Loire river in background |
Amboise in the Loire valley – where Leondardo Da Vinci died
and is buried and we stayed on an island in the middle of the Loire river. We
got in late – had no idea of what we were actually doing with getting into the
Aire (camping area) because we had to get a ticket and get through a boomgate.
We didn’t feel too silly though, there were a whole lot of native French
speakers who were pushing the help button on the automatic ticket machine and
seemingly abusing the voice on the other end, because apparently they didn’t
know how to get a ticket either! We got
in, but then weren’t sure if we would ever get out, certainly we spent the next
12 hours with Stephen having to hurdle the gate to press a button to let me
back in. Amboise is a pretty little
town, whose claim to fame, apart from Leonardo, is that French King Charles
VII, swiped the Chateau d’Amboise from some bloke who had plotted against him,
and then he stationed archers there. Eventually, Charles VIII was born there
and eventually married Anne de Bretagne, who was already married to another
bloke, but what the king wants, the king gets, so he just annulled that
marriage, got the girl and the kingdom that came with her. Anne set the castle
up just the way she liked it, surrounded herself with lots of arty types, had
some renovations done. Charles VIII hit his head a door lintel and dropped dead
without a heir, so Anne then had to marry Loius XII. The whole clan were very
incestuous, cousins marrying cousins etc, all for territory. Still no heirs, so
Francois 1 become king in 1515 and after fighting the Italians and claiming
some of their territory, he become very paly with Leonardo Da Vinci, so he
invited him to Amboise and gifted him a house, Le Clos Luce. The Mona Lisa was
actually in the house for a time. We toured both the Chateau and the house,
both very interesting. Michael you would love this place - I can just imagine you as a child engrossed in all the models of the inventions. You would then have set about trying to build them all - probably always destined to be an engineer. As we toured the house and went into Leonardo's bedroom there is a cat asleep on the bed. They take their pets (particularly their dogs) everywhere - museums, Lascaux caves, restaurants!
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| Le Close Luce from the garden |
The most amazing thing for me was that d’Artagnan (of
Three Musketeers fame) was in the Chateau in 1661 escorting Nicolas Fouquet to
Paris for his trial. Now that makes history and those books I read years ago come to life!!
Love to all
S&E
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