A wooden model of a car designed by Leonardo da Vinci on display at an exhibition in Florence. (AP)

Vinci (Italy), July 2 (Reuters): 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.

This sleepy Tuscan hill town just north of Florence is celebrating Da Vinci with an expansion of its Leonardiano Museum. And the main attraction these days is Leonardo’s automobile. That’s right, an automobile. It’s 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 discover. “As Leonardo became older, he dedicated more time to mechanical sketches and doodles than to art,” Romano Nanni, the museum’s director, said matter-of-factly.

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.

The car, unveiled earlier 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. You would have a hard time imagining some Renaissance-era Marcello Mastroianni trying to impress a Tuscan beauty on the streets of 15th century Florence with it.

But historians suspect that Leonardo did design it to impress someone important.

“We think Leonardo probably designed it to move according to a pre-set course at a royal court, perhaps to cause a sensation for a visiting king from outside Italy,” Nanni said. Girolamo Calvi, an Italian academic and trailblazer in modern Da Vinci 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 theorised about how the car might work and built several models. But each begged 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 Da Vinci 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.