Publisher's Synopsis
This book covers a subject researched at the Centre of Documentation for the History of Florentine Welfare and Health: three stone cisterns situated in the basements of the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence. There are provided elements for investigation and information on a question that has long required an answer: were these tanks used for the dissection of corpses and - consequently - do these rooms and the cisterns have anything to do with the figure of Leonardo da Vinci? The results of this research are presented in a bilingual text with plenty of images of the cisterns under investigation and the rooms in which they are sited, together with a privately owned cistern of similar type, whose use is known. The investigation also contains the mineralogical and petrographic research on residual materials.
