You can really feel sorry for her. She was pelted with cake, locked away behind thick bulletproof glass, photographed to death and printed on the most hideous knick-knack cups – and more recently, the Italian historian Silvano Vinceti claims that he can accurately identify the bridge of the world's landscape behind her back. It is "undoubtedly" the "Etruscan-Roman" Romito four-arch bridge in Laterina in the province of Arezzo in Tuscany, of which, however, only one arch remains today. It is therefore hardly sufficient for the "Spiegel" to write that Vicenti's identification emerges from "concurring media reports", but then only links to the identical report of the Viennese "Standard".
Incidentally, the historian is the same Vinceti who, a few years ago, was the first in the long history of the painting's reception to have discovered the microscopic letters "LV" in the left eye and the enigmatic "BS" in the right eye of the Mona Lisa, and who also saw da Vinci's mysterious numerical code "72" under the bridge, if not on the original in the Louvre, but on a scan of the image. According to the chairman of the Committee on Cultural Property and the Environment (officially: "Comitato nazionale per la valorizzazione dei beni storici culturali e ambientali"), the "72" comes from Kabbalah and testifies to the Renaissance painter's intensive preoccupation with this doctrine.
Perhaps he should team up with Erich von Däniken to identify those alien runways just behind the bridge that may still be hidden there. But Vinceti is not the only one who has identified the real Mona Lisa Bridge. If you comb through the net, you will be offered, among other things, the Ponte Buriano, built in 1277, with the entry "This bridge can be seen in the background of the painting Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci". You will probably have to cross (at least) seven bridges in the future. Apart from that, Leonardo did not portray a real landscape in front of the easel plein air, as suggested by the rugged mountains rising on both sides of the bridge, which would have had to have been tunneled under for a continuation of the path.
Rather, he conceived a symbolic world landscape with jagged crenellated blue mountains with ice peaks, brings all the elements, especially the water – it "meanders through a heavily eroded mountain landscape", as the art historian Frank Fehrenbach aptly wrote – into a cycle of the wildest paths, and ends this allegory of fluctuating forces of nature by letting the water droplets of the picture background dissolve in the aggregate state of the vague sfumato haze. Simona Neri, mayor of Laterina, is hoping for many tourists for her village, near the only possible Mona Lisa Bridge.