Nepal, June 20 -- It was late April 1519. After months of illness the maestro himself, Leonardo da Vinci, who had accomplished the impossible in his life, had begun to feel that his death was only a few days away. At this decisive moment when the sunshine of existence had begun to retreat into the abyss he was not, unlike any other mortals, tormented by the terror of the unknown, instead his thoughts and soul kept returning to the contemplation of that force, both enigmatic and sublime, which had made him the person he had become during the limited period granted on this planet.

Leonardo lay in his deathbed, his chiseled chin buried in the labyrinth of his sagely beard. Disenchanted by the politics of his home country Italy he had been l...