More on Leonardo:

Find out about the real Leonardo da Vinci, the hero of Providence and Robert Sabuda!

The Florence economy and its writers, painters, architects, and philosophers all made the city a model of Renaissance culture. The invention of the printing press encouraged literacy and helped to spread new ideas. (Remember how Providence and Leonardo use the printing press to make signs to help look for the lost twins?)

The real Leonardo usually wrote his notes in reverse, right to left. His messages may look funny on paper, but if you were to hold them up to a mirror you could easily read the words. People have different ideas about why Leonardo wrote this way. Maybe he was trying to prevent people from stealing his ideas. The teachings of the church sometimes disagreed with Leonardo’s scientific observations, so perhaps he was trying to protect himself by making his notes difficult to decipher. In Leonardo’s time people used ink to write with and it would sometimes smear as a person’s hand moved across the page. Perhaps Leonardo wrote right to left to avoid this messiness and keep his notes clean and smudge free.

Here is a message Providence wrote using Leonardo’s mirror writing. Try printing this page and then holding it up to a mirror to decode the words.

If you want to try backwards writing yourself, visit the Science Learning Network. In addition to stories about Leonardo’s life, they have a right to left word converter. You can type in your name or a sentence and click a button to see what it would look like if Leonardo had written it. Try it.