Sneak peek: Season 2 of Starz's 'Da Vinci's Demons'

Brian Truitt | USA TODAY

Leonardo da Vinci is going on a road trip.

Creator and executive producer David Goyer promised the Da Vinci's Demons faithful that Starz's Renaissance man of action would be traveling in the second season of the series. He wasn't kidding: Da Vinci (Tom Riley) and other characters will encounter 15th-century drama all over Italy, but also in South America, with Machu Picchu as a key locale when the show returns in the spring.

Fans at New York Comic Con will get their first look at the new season of Da Vinci's Demons, now filming in the Welsh town of Swansea, when a three-minute trailer is screened at a panel with cast members Friday.

"I always pitched Starz that the show would ultimately be kind of a road show," Goyer says. "I described it as this secret history of the man who invented the future and, by extension, the secret history of the world. That means you can't just stay in Florence."

The first season of the historical fantasy posited da Vinci as a genius Indiana Jones type, who also invented flying machines and many other advancements of the time.

In addition to aligning himself with the ruling Medici family and their struggle against the power-hungry Catholic Church of Rome, this season, da Vinci is thrown into a search to find out more about the cult Sons of Mithras and the mythical Book of Leaves, the tome that sends da Vinci toward the New World and right into conflict with ancient Incan tribes.

The Machu Picchu setting provides an opportunity to "lean into the Raiders of the Lost Ark stuff, but da Vinci himself is in a much more obsessive, darker place this season," says Goyer, who has been intrigued recently by research that places Chinese and European explorers in the Americas centuries before the established explorers identified in textbooks.

"I live and breathe that stuff. It fits very nicely into the DNA of the show."

Characters such as Lorenzo de Medici (Elliot Cowan), his wife, Clarice Orsini (Lara Pulver), Lucrezia Donati (Laura Haddock), Count Riario (Blake Ritson) and Pope Sixtus IV (James Faulkner) will find themselves involved with different relationships and alliances.

And Goyer teases that da Vinci will also share screen time with the Mona Lisa, though maybe not in the way viewers might expect.

"He didn't paint the Mona Lisa until 15 years later, at least," Goyer says. Part of the vernacular of the show is a certain fluidity of time, and "we may see a glimpse of the end of da Vinci's life next season."

He concedes that Starz was a little nervous at first about the new penchant for globe-trotting. But "they saw the first cut of a couple of episodes, and they loved it. Then they said, 'Wow. Now we're cool if you take da Vinci anywhere.' "