Dec. 3 – The Italian Ambassador Antonio Zanardi Landi, alongside the Regional Director for Cultural Heritage and Landscape of Piedmont Mario Turetta, the Director of the Royal Library of Turin Giovanni Saccani, the Vice Minister of Russian Culture Andrey Busygin, and the Director of the Museum Irina Antonova, was present at the inauguration, which took place a few days ago at the Pushkin Museum, of “Exhibitaly – Italian Excellence today.” In particular, the ceremony celebrated the opening of the exhibition on Leonardo Da Vinci’s Code on the Flight of Birds. The Code, exhibited for the first time in Russia, is rarely lent outside the Royal Library and in recent years has been exposed only in Turin, Brussels, the United States and Aquila (during the G8 Summit). The Code, in honor of which the Italian Embassy in Moscow oversaw the creation of a modern edition by Carlo Pedretti, Mikhail Mogilevsky and Sara Taglialagamba, is also at the heart of an interesting story uniting Italy and Russia. Stolen from the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan by Napoleon and taken to Paris, the Code was then purchased in 1892 by Theodore Sabašnikov, the heir of a wealthy family of Siberian merchants originating Kyakhta, a small town south of Lake Baikal, who donated it in 1893 to the King of Italy, Umberto I. The latter commissioned the Royal Library of Turin, where the Code now rests. One hundred and nineteen years later, the Code was brought to Russia as a tribute to the many Russians who love Italy, and in particular as a posthumous gesture to the Russian admirer and lover of Leonardo’s Code.
