www.amboise-valdeloire.co.uk. A rather charmless small town, Amboise parades the prerequisite château, but its saving grace is Clos-Lucé, the highly entertaining twilight home of Italian Renaissance genius Leonardo da Vinci.

The Château Royal d’Amboise dominates this section of the Loire from its hill-top perch. Charles VIII was bom here in 1470, and initiated much of the building you see today – about one-fifth of the château’s size before the Revolution. Key sights are the 16thC Logis Royal; the Tour des Minimes with its revolutionary carriage ramp; and the delightful Gothic Chapelle de Saint-Hubert built for Anne de Bretagne.

Da Vinci arrived in Amboise around 1515 at the invitation of Francois I. He spent the last four years of his life at Clos–Lucé, a brick-and-tufa manor house now spruced up with Renaissance furnishings and displaying 40 scale models built from his designs by IBM. A bat-wing flying machine hovers over the stairwell, while various cannons and machine guns, a swivel bridge, a paddleboat and armoured tank like an animated oyster on wheels occupy the basement – all centuries ahead of their time, and useless for lack of power.