Transport: Italians forced to back-pedal on bicycle claims

It has not been a good week for Italy. A nation still in shock from the toppling of its once all-powerful football team by England and the tremors of a succession of earthquakes in Umbria was rocked again yesterday as cracks appeared in another symbol of its national pride.

Italy's claims to have discovered the bicycle, through the inventive genius of Leonardo da Vinci, were yesterday looking decidedly shaky after further examination of his Renaissance manuscripts.

In 1974, when the papers were discovered, experts concluded that though the bicycle drawing did not come from da Vinci's own hand, it was a pupil's rough reproduction of a lost original by the master.

But a German historian, Hans-Erhard Lessing, has investigated the manuscripts and claims that the bicycle diagram was tampered with as recently as the 1960s.

He told New Scientist magazine: "No one questioned it. The Italians were ecstatic to have invented the bicycle."

Mr Lessing tracked down an art historian, Carlo Pedretti, from the University of California at Los Angeles, who examined the folded pages before they were restored by Italian monks in the 1960s. He held the papers up to a strong light yet saw no sign of a bicycle.

Instead, his notebook recorded two circles with curved lines through them where the cycle now appears. Mr Pedretti said: "What I saw was not a bicycle."

Ian Burrell