National Air and Space Museum and Embassy of Italy will webcast the press preview of "Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex on the Flight of Birds" — part of the "2013: Year of Italian Culture in the United States."

Speakers include:
- Gen. J.R. “Jack” Dailey, director, National Air and Space Museum
- Claudio Bisogniero, ambassador of Italy to the United States
- Charles Elachi, director, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA
- Message from International Space Station by astronaut Luca Parmitano
- Giovanni Saccani, director, Biblioteca Reale, Turin, Italy
- Peter Jakab, chief curator, National Air and Space Museum
- Silvia Rosa Brusin, deputy managing editor, RAI, Italian National Television

Leonardo da Vinci created masterpieces of art and sculpture. He recorded his forward-looking ideas in thousands of notebook pages, known as codices. He produced one codex entirely on flight in 1505-1506, the Codex on the Flight of Birds. This extraordinary document, exhibited outside of Italy only a few times, will be displayed in The Wright Brothers & The Invention of the Aerial Age gallery. The Codex exhibit will be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to appreciate the genius of da Vinci in the same space as the Wright Flyer, which made the airplane a reality four centuries after the Leonardo produced the Codex on the Flight of Birds.

To access media materials on this exhibit, visit: http://airandspace.si.edu/about/newsroom/