The background behind Mona Lisa

The Telegraph today carried a story about this, then inexplicably embedded a photo which doesn't show the bridge, so I had to search further, and will excerpt instead from a better article at Epoque Travelogue:

Scholars have debated for centuries if the backgrounds of some of Leonardo’s painting were just a figment of his imagination or if they were real landscapes. Professor Carlo Starnazzi, a paleontologist at the University of Florence, and many others here in the Valdarno are convinced that some of those dreamy landscapes are in fact inspired by this region.

Take the most famous of the great Master’s paintings, the Mona Lisa, which was painted between 1503 and 1507, that is after Leonardo’s activity in the Arezzo region. The landscape in the background is illustrated by an odd cliffy land that resembles the Calanchi very much. Moreover, on the center-right end of the painting, more or less at the height of Mona Lisa’s shoulder, one can distinguish an arched bridge.

For many experts, this bridge is none other than the Buriano bridge Ponte Buriano, built in approximately 1277 and a marvel of engineering of its time. The Buriano bridge, still open to traffic to this day, consists of seven distinctive arches and lies 6 km from the city of Arezzo: it is very reasonable to argue that Leonardo took careful notice of it while studying the area and placed it so gracefully in his masterpiece.

The same bridge appears in the Madonna of the Yarnwinder (1502).  For those photos, and other discussion re the mountainous landscape, see the primary link.

Mona Lisa source.