Michelangelo Da Vinci and its planes that stopped flying.

The Michelangelo da Vinci Restaurant Pizzeria is exactly located in Villamarzana just a few minutes from the city center, and was a different and original way to spend the evenings. The name is not casual, in fact brings together the two great geniuses of Italian art: Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo to give life to a unique place of its kind, where in every corner inside and outside there was a work of art. Here could choose between different settings of the Michelangelo da Vinci restaurant: the two real planes (a Douglas DC-6 and a Tupolev TU-134 A), the rustic in a fantastic place surrounded by frescoes and statues in a suggestive mix, or especially on summer evenings the cool in the garden under the giant wings of the two planes. This restaurant had a kitchen that could satisfy all tastes, for example the oval pizza, unique in Italy (50 × 37 cm) or an outdoor barbecue for grilled meat and fish. As for the appetizer, the kitchen offered tasty sandwiches, curious american fried, bruschettas, giant salads, main and second courses…and at the end, excellent homemade desserts, with fresh fish specialities every night. Gigi Stecca, Rovigo’s beer master, was the creator of all this. He is the creator of an original and healthy “invention”: a particular glass with internal grooves that reduces the alcoholic effect of beer (poured in the right way), without losing its freshness and indeed improving its taste. How? A mistery. In the summer season the Michelangelo da Vinci restaurant became disco music pub on Saturday evening, and live music with group dances on Sundays. The evocative locations, the friendliness and courtesy of the staff, made the Michelangelo Da Vinci the ideal setting for private parties and evenings with friends.

At the end, it was a dream, the pizzeria Michelangelo Da Vinci of Villamarzana. Two luxury planes parked in the center of the restaurant, kept together by a real control tower and transformed into a dining room. The Tupolev 134 with the colors of Csa and Dc 6 Lai were leaked to the honors of the chronicles at the end of the nineties when Gigi Stecca had decided to try a pharaonic enterprise: building a small airport near to the Transpolesana road, with a pool, disco and a country house, which has become a kind of museum dedicated to Michelangelo Buonarrotti and Leonardo Da Vinci. Gigi Stecca‘s project was to create a room on the two airplanes, reserved for boys and elderly people who never went aboard. For ten years he had worked as a manager in two homes for elderly people. He remember that many old men, when they saw an airplane in the sky, told him they would have liked to go aboard.

But now it’s closed for economic crisis and the fact that locals of this type need constant and costly maintenance (but not only). The “Michelangelo Da Vinci” opened its doors in 2000, and is forced to close in 2014 also due to a maxi fine for urbanisation abuses. It was 14th November 2000 when, just three months after the inauguration of the commercial activity, the municipality contested a mega-abuse building to the company Da Vinci Michelangelo srl. Not just any name: it is the company that launched the homonymous restaurant-pizzeria, the Michelangelo Da Vinci. For the municipality all abusive, including the “control tower” that gave access to two planes. Nothing to do: in the town hall they did not want to hear reasons for the maxi abuse, and they have gave a gigantic fine of one billion 252 million and 480 thousand lire. The euro, in fact, would have arrived in Italy only one year and half later. At that point a negotiation began, and speaking in euros, we are talking about more or less 280 thousand euros, even if, compared to 15 years earlier, the Da Vinci Michelangelo company no longer exists. He closed his doors, as well as the planes and the whole restaurant. And still today, since 2014, the restaurant is closed and totally abandoned.