Abstract: (The Recent Discovery of an Unbelievable Biography: Caterina, Mother of Leonardo da Vinci) Professor Carlo Vecce, a well-known academic and scholar of Leonardo’s life, in his recent novel translated into Romanian Surâsul Caterinei, mama lui Leonardo da Vinci (Humanitas Fiction, 2024) made an exceptional personal discovery while rummaging through the Florentine archives of the fifteenth century: the notarial deed of liberation of Leonardo’s mother, who was a Circassian slave, originally from the Caucasus. The great genius of the Italian Renaissance is therefore only half Italian. With a technique similar to cinematic travelling, the author travels together with Caterina, the slave sold and resold several times, narrating not only about the characters who interfered in her life, but also about the geographical and multi-ethnic spaces between the Venetian port Tana on the Azov Sea and the Italian shores, describing in very truthful details the territories threatened by the Tartar hordes, the decadent Constantinople, the corrupt Venice, the flourishing Florence and the poor Tuscan countryside of the fifteenth century. Caterina eventually obtains her freedom, but how many Caterinas like her, who are the slaves of this century, succeed in getting free indeed? Vecce interprets the strange landscape detail in Leonardo's Annunciation as a codified allusion to the sacred mountain of the Circassians his mother would have told him about in his childhood. The novel is not so easy to translate due to its multilingual inserts and its specific realia that make the story so plausible, but it’s a fascinating and vivid fresco of a glorious epoch.