Gioconda, bridge war. Vinceti raises his stakes on Romito: "A whirlpool closes the case."

The tidal wave that cut off the Mona Lisa's head? No, luckily, Mona Lisa's head is still there, enough to withstand the impact of thousands of tourists every day. Tourists who wonder everything except where Leonardo got the bridge behind the woman's left shoulder. And yet Silvano Vinceti , a writer with a passion for historical and artistic scoops, lives for this.

He had already tried once to debunk the hypothesis that those arches were not from Ponte Buriano but from Ponte Romito , in Laterina, fortunately still ours. Now he's relaunching his latest book, "La Gioconda Revealed," and he's arriving at the same goal by a different route. This time, the key would be an ancient stone wall that collected the waters of the Arno: well, that wall would generate a wave, a rogue wave, or at least a whirlpool. And that would be visible both in a preparatory study by Leonardo and in the painting preserved in the Louvre.

The smoking pipe? It doesn't have one, obviously, because any reconstruction must ultimately be fueled by doubts: but Vinceti cites the discovery of an ancient stone wall to intercept the waters of the Arno, once used to power a mill documented as early as the period between 1501 and 1504. And this wall would be exactly downstream from the Romito bridge .

"Until now, there were no reliable documents regarding the period of construction and operation of the mill," Vinceti explained to Adnkronos, "but now, thanks to new sources, we know that it was built before 1300 by the monks of the Abbey of Santa Maria in Alpe - San Galgano del Pratomagno, with the support of the Ubertini family." And to leave nothing to chance, he adds that "that hydraulic detail had already been noted by the art historian Carlo Pedretti." But perhaps it's too easy to win this way. Pedretti, you may recall, was a great friend and admirer of Carlo Starnazzi, the professor at the science school who had studied and analyzed the Ponte Buriano hypothesis under the microscope, capitalizing on the intuition of lawyer Cesare Mafucci. Unfortunately, Carlo is no longer with us, but one can imagine that faced with that whirlpool, he would have unleashed his entire "war machine." In a story that by now accustoms us to a surprise every day. The bridge's accolades came from Lake Como, specifically from the area between Lecco and Lake Garlate, located south of the main lake, focusing on the Azzone Visconti bridge, a symbol of the Lombardy city.

And the hat was also thrown onto the bridge from Bobbio, better known as the hometown of Marco Bellocchio, but certainly wouldn't mind this "connection" with Leonardo. But Vinceti is a tough nut to crack in this field. First, he set out to find the mortal remains of Count Matteo Maria Boiardo. Then he focused on works by Petrarch, Pico della Mirandola, Poliziano, and Leopardi. Not only that: he's working to reconstruct the face of Dante, and Pico himself: and his latest undertaking was to find the remains of Caravaggio, and we know how controversial the extraordinary painter's death is. But nothing is too much for Vinceti, who often returns to Leonardo's background.

Not just the little bridge on the shoulder of the Mona Lisa, but also the setting for the Virgin of the Rocks: there too, Starnazzi had worked hard, placing great emphasis on the profile of a beautiful slice of the Valdarno, the extraordinary Balze. And without being inspired by any of the swirling streams around.