Cesare Borgia, the son of Pope Alexander VI, was born in and lived in Rome. Borgia was the comander in chief of the papal army at the peak of his power. Leonardo da Vinci was a patron of Borgia from 1502 to 1503, being given the title "senior military architect, and general engineer". It was Borgia who commissioned da Vinci to create military weaponry/machinery, and da Vinci's design for the machine gun thus was born.

Treviso held ties to Venice during the 13th century and was home to some of the early printers during the Italian Renaissance. It is here that Bartolomeo Confalonieri prints the first copies of Theophrastus's Historia plantarum, which layed the foundation for the study of botany. These prints could now find their way around Italy and Europe; exposing scholars like Leonardo da Vinci to Theophrastus's research.

This museam holds Galileo's telescope and exhibitions on the many observations he made with it.  Many of these discoveries further explained many of da Vinci's observations reguarding the moon's surface.