The Last Supper

What it is

Il Cenacolo Vinciano is a one-room state museum built around a single wall. The room is the refectory of the Dominican monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie, the hall where the friars ate, prayed and meditated, and the north wall of it carries Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper. The museum dates the painting 1495 to 1498 and records its technique as dry wall-painting and its size as 460 by 880 centimetres. Ludovico Sforza, who had drawn Leonardo to Milan in 1482 and kept him at court until 1499, wanted Santa Maria delle Grazie as a monument to his power and his family, and commissioned the refectory decoration from him. Since September 1980 the painting, the church and the monastery have together been a UNESCO World Heritage Site, described in the citation as a unique artistic achievement of exceptional universal value. Since 3 December 2024 the museum has no longer been run by the regional museum directorate for Lombardy: ministerial decree 299 of 25 September 2024 transferred it to the Pinacoteca di Brera, as part of a Milanese museum centre grouping the Pinacoteca, this museum, the Biblioteca Braidense and Palazzo Citterio. What that means for a visitor is that the ticket, the booking system and the fifteen-minute slot belong to a conservation regime, not to a queue-management one.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

What's inside

The refectory holds two paintings facing each other, and the museum treats both as its collection. Leonardo's Last Supper occupies the north wall. The south wall carries Giovanni Donato Montorfano's Crucifixion, painted after 1495 in true fresco and, because of that technique, still well preserved where Leonardo's is not. Montorfano signed and dated it on a stone block at the foot of the cross; the composition sets three crosses across a crowded Calvary with a city in the background evoking Jerusalem. In its lower zone Leonardo probably added portraits of Ludovico il Moro with his son Ercole Massimiliano at the left and Beatrice d'Este with their son Francesco at the right. He painted them on already dry wall, the colour peeled, and today they are little more than uncertain shadows. The approach matters too. Along the corridor leading to the refectory there survive large fragments of mid-seventeenth-century frescoes showing a martyrdom, possibly the killing of forty-nine Dominicans at Sandomierz, and the second stretch looks onto the Cloister of the Dead, once the friars' burial ground. Inside the museum there is a tactile model of the Last Supper, and a bookshop run by Giunti that is reachable only by ticket holders.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

How long to spend

Budget forty-five minutes for the whole thing and treat the booked time on the ticket as a deadline, not a suggestion. The museum's own figures set the shape of the visit: fifteen minutes inside the refectory, a maximum of forty people admitted at a time, and an instruction to arrive at least thirty minutes before the booked slot to hand in the payment receipt at the ticket office beside the museum entrance. Arrive later than that and the operator states plainly that the admission fee is forfeited. The access regulations allow entry ten minutes before the time printed on the ticket, and the fifteen minutes in the refectory are described as strict. The lockers at the ticket office are timed to the length of the visit with a sixty-minute maximum, which is a useful independent measure of how long the museum expects a visitor to be on the premises. So the realistic sequence is thirty minutes of arrival, security check and waiting, fifteen minutes with the painting, then a few minutes for the bookshop on the way out. This is not a museum that rewards lingering, because the route through it is one-way and the doors are opened and closed automatically to control the air.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

Season and crowds

The museum opens Tuesday to Sunday from 08:15 to 19:00, with last admission at 18:45. The ticket office runs Tuesday to Sunday from 08:00 to 18:45. It is closed every Monday and on 1 January and 25 December, unless the Ministry of Culture directs otherwise. Occasional evening openings are announced on the operator's calendar of special admission days, and occasional unscheduled closures happen too: on Thursday 16 July 2026 the museum shut from 12:45 to 15:15 for a staff meeting, with last entry at 12:30. Check the news page before travelling. The harder timing question is not the hour but the booking date. Tickets are released quarterly: September opens November, December and January; December opens February, March and April; March opens May, June and July; June opens August, September and October. Admissions for September to December 2026 went on sale on Tuesday 23 June 2026 at 12:00. Additional tickets are released every Wednesday at noon for the following week, on the online platform only, so a date that looks sold out is worth rechecking. Free first-Sunday admissions appear online at noon on the preceding Wednesday, and the operator warns that availability on free days cannot be assured.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

Tickets

Advance booking is mandatory at all times, for everyone including infants, and for every kind of admission including the free ones. The published fares are €15.00 full price from twenty-five years of age, €2.00 reduced from eighteen to twenty-five, and free up to eighteen; the full list of concession and free-entry categories is kept on the museum's own FAQ page. There are three booking channels: the online platform, a maximum of five tickets; the call centre on +39 02 92800360, a maximum of nine; and email to [email protected] for groups of ten or more. Online and call-centre buyers may take no more than five tickets in a calendar year. Tickets are personal and carry the visitor's name to stop resale, and the name cannot be changed afterwards, so enter it carefully at purchase. Once the purchase is complete the date and time cannot be changed and the ticket cannot be refunded — check the slot before paying. The payment receipt is exchanged for the ticket at the office next to the museum entrance, and that has to happen at least thirty minutes before the visit. On free or reduced days, groups are not accepted and guided tours and workshops are not available.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

Getting there

The address is Piazza Santa Maria delle Grazie 2, in the western part of central Milan. No car is needed and the operator advises against one: the museum sits inside Area C, Milan's charged central zone, and it recommends public transport as the easier approach. Metro line 1, the red line, stops at Cadorna or Conciliazione; metro line 2, the green line, also stops at Cadorna. Tram 16, running between Monte Velino and Stadio San Siro, stops at S. Maria delle Grazie, effectively at the door. Buses 50 and 169 stop on Via Boccaccio. Drivers who come anyway will find blue-striped paid parking on Via Fratelli Ruffini, which also has free parking bays for people with disabilities, and further paid car parks nearby. Taxis stop at Via Ruffini 1, opposite the ticket office. The museum states that it is accessible to people with mobility difficulties, and it has joined AISM's Easy Go Out project, which publishes access details for planning a visit in advance.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

What to watch out for

The rule that most often costs people their visit is the thirty-minute one: the receipt must be exchanged for a ticket at least half an hour before the booked slot, and the operator says the admission is lost otherwise. The second is luggage. Bags, bulky luggage, food and drink may not be brought in, and the lockers at the ticket office are few and explicitly for emergencies while they last — thirty of 30x45x32 cm, eight of 25x36x32 cm, eight of 25x36x66 cm, and one each of 82x33x80 and 40x33x80 cm. Leave the suitcase at the hotel. Entry involves a ticket check and a visual and metal-detector inspection of belongings, waivable only on presentation of a dated, signed medical certificate. Inside, the marked route is compulsory and its automatic doors are opened remotely to filter the air; visitors are told not to push them. Mobile phones must be silenced and may not be used along the route or in the refectory. Music, smoking including e-cigarettes, running, sitting or lying on the floor and any commercial activity are prohibited, and animals other than guide dogs and certified therapy animals are not admitted. Guided commentary is permitted only through audio guides, which the museum itself does not supply.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

Photography

Come to look rather than to shoot. The museum's access regulations state that, to preserve the painting, flash photography and video recording are not allowed inside the refectory, and that professional photographs or videos require a prior request to the museum's management and written authorisation. The same regulations forbid using a mobile phone along the museum route and inside the refectory, and require phones to be silenced for the duration of the visit — so a visitor should expect to be asked to put the handset away rather than to work out a quiet shot. Nothing published by the operator grants a general permission for hand-held photography of the Last Supper, and this guide does not claim one. The practical consequence is that the fifteen minutes are best spent on the wall itself: the north wall painting is 460 by 880 centimetres, lit low and evenly for conservation, and it does not photograph well in any case. For images, the museum publishes the Last Supper in high definition on its own website, and a separate image-request procedure exists for anyone who needs a reproduction for publication. A free official app for iOS and Android is meant to be downloaded before arriving.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

Where it is

Nearby

External links

• View on Wikidata