Amboise: The Royal Château and Leonardo's Tomb

Required Activities

• Find Leonardo's grave in the Chapel of Saint-Hubert, then walk out to the bust of him on the terrace, standing on the footprint of the collegiate church of Saint-Florentin where he was actually buried in 1519 — the bones under the chapel slab are the ones Arsène Houssaye dug out of that site in 1863 and had moved here in 1874

• Walk up the inside of the tour des Minimes or the tour Heurtault — hollow cavalier towers built round a gentle spiral ramp so that coaches and teams could be driven from the town straight up onto the terraces, as Charles V was when he visited — and come out on the terrace above the Loire

• Stand at the balustrades along the terrace, where most of the Amboise conspirators were hanged in the days after the failed attack of 17 March 1560 while the court watched

• Walk the jardin d'Orient on the south-east side of the terraces, laid out by Rachid Koraïchi in 2005 for the emir Abd el-Kader's companions who died in captivity here, and find the alley aligned on Mecca that cuts across the line of stelae

• In the Antichambre de la Cordelière, read the fireplace: Anne of Brittany's arms ringed by the interlaced cords of her order and the collar of Saint-Michel, with Francis I's salamander on the wood panel above

• Before going in to the chapel, read the doorway: the lintel carries the hunt of Saint Hubert, cut in white tuffeau by Flemish sculptors between 1491 and 1496, and the tympanum above it — 19th-century work — shows Charles VIII and Anne of Brittany