Amboise

If you didn't already know it, the Loire Valley where we've been hanging out (and freezing our tender tootsies off) was the summer playground for the French royals (before the French people started with the "off with their heads!").  We've seen about 5 of them now (there are 12 major ones I think).  Our first was at Amboise which is on the Loire River about 25 kms east of Tours (which is 2.5 hours west of Paris).

I've got a couple of hundred shots off all of these Chateaus but I'll try to keep it to under 30 for each one.  In this entry, I'll talk to the Chateau at Amboise as well as where Leonardo da Vinci stayed the last four years of his life (1515-1519).  The main builder of most of these chateaus was King Francois I.  As a child his mother named him after the country (or more correctly convinced him that the people were named after him and that each letter in his name meant someting).  The guy grew up to have quite a hankering for chateaus....  no wonder the French eventually got around to chopping off the heads of his descendants!

Anyway, Francois didn't build this one, his father, Charles VII had confiscated it from a man named Amboise who plotted against him.  This is where Francois was raised and was the site of the Royal Court for many decades.  His son, Charles VIII, who was responsible for bringing much of the Italian Renascence architecture here would die here as a young man hitting his head on one of the low stone doorways.  (Note to self and to son Shawn... remember to duck!)

Henry II and his wife, Catherine de' Medici, raised their children in Château Amboise along with Mary Stuart, the child Queen of Scotland (yes, that Mary) who had been promised in marriage to the future French Francis II.

In 1560, during the French Wars of Religion, a conspiracy by members of the Huguenot House of Bourbon against the House of Guise that virtually ruled France in the name of the young Francis II was uncovered by the comte de Guise and stifled by a series of hangings, which took a month to carry out. By the time it was finished, 1200 Protestants were gibbetted, strung from the town walls, hung from the iron hooks that held pennants and tapestries on festive occasions and from the very balcony of the Logis du Roy. The Court soon had to leave the town because of the smell of corpses.  It never came back.

Here is our first look at the "chateau"... 

OK.... this thing is going to be a bit bigger than we first thought!

You can't come a an old Chateau and not see an old 2CV!  

Yup.... more stairs to climb.  I think I must have married Suzanne Somers.

I love these trees... we often saw them on walls of buildings.   This one is over 150 years old!

Phew... we're finally almost at the top...  that's a chapel in the distance.... more later

And THERE is the real chateau.... all this on top of that big wall we just climbed up.

A close up of the chapel

A look over the wall to the town square below

The inside of the chapel.  I NEVER get tired of looking at those arched ceilings...  they just blow me away.

Here's where they planted Leonardo... as Shawn says... he was pretty short!

A look over the other side of the walls towards the Loire River

Here is s scale model to give you some perspective....  that large turret on the right is what we originally thought was a bit of the Chateau...  the chapel is the tower just left of centre and at the front wall.  The Chateau is on the back wall.  The ramp we climbed up into the fortress starts out on the left front and goes up underground in a zig zag and pops out in front of that circular patch of grass in front of the chateau.  You could bring an army on horses up that ramp.  

This is a "Gothic" style fireplace in the chateau.  I am fascinated by the fireplaces  (having  built  a rather large one myself with help from my Dad in our house a few years back).

I just can't get over those arches...  quite the room.

The keystone has his coat of arms.

The walls of these chateaus would be covered in tapestries to keep it warm and then when the king wasn't there, they'd pack them all up and ship them off to his next spot.  Some of these Chateaus took over 100 years to build and the kings might get to stay in them for 18-20 times over their entire reign.   

At the other end of the room is a "Renascence" version of the fireplace.

Here's a recreation of where he'd sleep. The beds were quite small and the curtains gave him about the only privacy he'd ever get as he had casts of people helping him get dressed and undressed.  It was quite a ceremony.

Substantial gardens as well.  We've seen lots of these trees in France.  They cut them like this every spring but they branch out like crazy so by summer they''ll be in full leaves.

It wouldn't have been easy to attack this place

They'd build them right on the edge of the cliff to make them look even more imposing...

Here's Clos Luce where Leonardo stayed for the last 4 years of his life before passing away at 67  as an extremely old looking man.  The king gave him the use of the place along with a salary of 700 gold coins to entice him to leave Italy (where he was in  a spot of trouble).  He crossed the Alps on a mule's back with three paintings (including the Mona Lisa).  He whiled away here and many believe designed Chambord Chateau's majestic double helix staircase. 

Here's his bed (where he passed away in the presence of the King).  Note the cat making himself quite at home behind the roped off area!

IBM had put together an exhibition below in the basement of some of his inventions using original materials from his sketches.  There was also a long tunnel between this house and the Royal Chateau (probably 1/2 km long).  This particular invention is the one that blew me away... remember he did this in the late 1400's.  This is a wind up car!  You would put a crank on the rear axle (each wheel) and wind it up.  Each wheel is connected to a wound steel spring plate around a wooden axle... so when you release it the wheels would turn by themselves.  It also had a carefully timed steering mechanism so that it would park itself.  They had an animation... you could wind up the wheels and then set it down and flick a lever and it would take off and then a 90 degree turn and park itself.  Like many of Leonardo's inventions this one needed more power than was available at the time.  Incroyable...

The guy invented the bicycle too...  hundreds of years before manufacturing caught up with it?  Note that it has a chain drive and pedals just like a modern bike.  This one is made from wood.

The first transmission... he figured out that the different sized gears would develop different power... and used this to great effect on water wheels.  You should see the wooden ball bearings he designed... EXACTLY like the steel ones in use today.

This ingenious contraption is for measuring distances.  The top gear has holes in it that contain marbles... as each meter ticks by it drops one marble in a box (just out of sight).  You simply count the marbles to figure out how far you went.  

This is a tank....  fully 450 years before they were first used in WW1.  This one could move in many directions pedaled by 8 men inside, each of them also manning a cannon (you can make them out).  The sloped walls were to deflect enemy shots.  It needed smooth ground but was supposed to be quite deadly.