Abbey of Santa Maria di Grottaferrata

Greek-rite monastery in Grottaferrata, in the hills south-east of Rome, Lazio, Italy.

At a glance

Source	Author	Role	In one line
It’s All About the Bike	Robert Penn	subject	Site of the Leonardo bicycle-sketch hoax.

It’s All About the Bike: In Pursuit of Happiness on Two Wheels — Robert Penn (2010)

Source: It’s All About the Bike · It’s All About the Bike - In Pursuit of Happiness on Two Wheels · Readwise highlight

I’d like to think that a cycling-mad monk in the Laboratorio di Restauro, part of the venerated library within the tenth-century Abbey of Santa Maria di Grottaferrata, was bored one day.

• Role: subject
• In the book: Penn relays the claim that monks at the abbey discovered a bicycle sketch on a restored page of Leonardo’s Codex Atlanticus, explains that it was a hoax, and imagines a bored, cycling-mad monk in the abbey’s restoration laboratory adding the doodle.
• Why it matters: The abbey is the setting of the Leonardo-bicycle forgery story, which Penn uses to debunk the claim that the bicycle was an Italian invention. Without the monks’ laboratory the story has no site.
• Real vs. fictional: Real abbey; the monk scene is Penn’s own imagining, the discovery claim is reported.