The Last Supper

There is no more famous painting in Italy that is harder to see. Leonardo da Vinci painted the Last Supper between about 1495 and 1498 for Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, on the end wall of the refectory, the monks' dining hall, of the Dominican convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie. He chose to work not in true fresco, which must be painted quickly into wet plaster, but with a slow, experimental tempera and oil technique on a dry wall, so that he could revise and build up subtle tones. It was a brilliant and disastrous choice: the paint began to flake within his lifetime, and the following centuries brought damp, clumsy restorations, a door cut through the bottom of the scene, Napoleonic troops using the room as a stable and, in August 1943, an Allied bomb that destroyed the refectory roof while the painting survived behind sandbags. A twenty-year restoration completed in 1999 removed centuries of overpainting to reveal what remains of Leonardo's own hand. What you see is the instant after Christ says that one of the apostles will betray him: twelve men recoil in four groups of three, a wave of shock and denial rippling out from the calm, triangular figure at the centre, all set in a perspective so precise that the painted room seems to continue the real one. Judas, clutching his money bag, leans back into shadow. Even faded, the faces and hands are electric. On the opposite wall hangs Montorfano's large Crucifixion fresco of 1495, painted in true fresco and still bright, a reminder of how the room once looked. The refectory is kept under strict climate control, and visitors enter in small groups, through a series of filtered airlock rooms, for a strictly timed visit of about a quarter of an hour.

Tickets are the whole challenge. The museum, run by the Italian state, sells timed, named tickets online in blocks that open a few months ahead (tickets for September to December 2026, for example, went on sale on 23 June 2026), and popular slots can sell out within hours of release. Online orders are capped at a handful of tickets per purchase. The museum is open Tuesday to Sunday and closed on Mondays, with occasional special closures for strikes and staff meetings and free or one-euro evening openings on certain national days, all announced on the official news page. If you are travelling in early 2027, watch for the next release, which had not been announced at the start of November 2026. If the official tickets are gone, the dependable fallback is a guided tour that includes entry, sold by authorised operators through platforms such as Tiqets: you pay more, but you get a guaranteed slot and a guide who explains the painting before your fifteen minutes begin. Arrive at least twenty minutes early to collect tickets; latecomers usually lose their slot.

Making the most of fifteen minutes: read about the painting before you go, because once inside there is no time to study a guidebook. Stand back at first, from the middle of the room, to see how the perspective lines all converge on Christ's head; then move closer to look at the hands, which tell the story of each apostle's reaction, and at the details of the table, the bread, the wine and the overturned salt cellar near Judas. Turn round for the Crucifixion before your time runs out. Photographs without flash are generally permitted, but the experience is better without a screen. The visit is calm and quiet, and children who have seen a picture of the painting first tend to find it memorable rather than dull.

Around the refectory: step into the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie itself, a separate free visit, to see Bramante's luminous Renaissance tribune and the cloister. Across the street, the Casa degli Atellani shows the restored vineyard that Ludovico Sforza gave Leonardo while he worked on the painting. The Corso Magenta neighbourhood is one of Milan's most elegant, and the basilica of Sant'Ambrogio and the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, which holds Leonardo's Codex Atlanticus drawings, make natural pairings on the same day.