The Last Supper

Last Supper tickets: booked slots and guided tours

Every visit to the Last Supper is booked for a set time, with each visitor’s name on the ticket, and there’s no buying at the door. The museum lets in up to 40 people every 15 minutes, because more people in the refectory would raise the humidity around a painting that’s already fragile.

The official tickets come out in batches, a few months at a time, and they sell out. Right now nothing can be booked after 31 December 2026.

Tour operators hold a share of every day’s places and sell them with a guide: 38 per cent from Tuesday to Thursday and 30 per cent from Friday to Sunday, in figures published in January 2025. The first tour below, from €95, gives you a skip-the-line entry at a set time, a live guide and a headset so you can hear the guide, for about an hour in all, 15 minutes of it in front of the painting. Infants go free. The ticket can’t be cancelled.

The second is the same kind of hour with a live guide, but it gathers the slots of several tour operators in one listing, so the price depends on whose slot you pick. The third does the Last Supper, the Duomo and La Scala’s theatre and museum in three and a half hours, with a walking tour and an air-conditioned coach between them. It costs €119, it’s cancellable up to 24 hours before, and it leaves out the Duomo’s rooftop terraces.

Is the Last Supper included in a Milan city pass?

No. Neither of the two YesMilano City Passes includes or discounts the Last Supper, and nor do The Milan Pass or the Milan City Card, so the tour is a booking of its own with any pass.

The passes are for the rest of your stay. The YesMilano Standard includes the Duomo and the six civic museums, the Sforza Castle among them, with three days of metro, trams and buses. The castle shares a metro stop with the Last Supper, Cadorna. What each pass covers is laid out in Milan Pass and Milan’s city passes.

Last Supper opening hours and your 15 minutes inside

The refectory opens six days a week and has no separate winter timetable.

The route is accessible to visitors with reduced mobility, and there’s a tactile model of the painting in the refectory. There’s also an audio description of the Last Supper and of the Crucifixion for blind and partially sighted visitors.

What you see in the Last Supper refectory

The refectory was the dining hall of the Dominican friars of Santa Maria delle Grazie, and the Last Supper covers its end wall, 460 by 880 centimetres. Leonardo painted the moment Jesus says that one of the twelve will betray him. The apostles react in groups of three, and Christ sits in the middle, framed by the three windows behind him, with the vanishing point of the painting on the right side of his face.

Judas is the one in shadow, with the purse, the salt cellar tipped over and his head lower than the others’. The tablecloth is white with blue stripes, and the lunettes above the painting carry the coats of arms of the Sforza.

In the lower centre an irregular arch breaks into the scene. It’s a doorway cut through the wall in 1652 and bricked up again later, and you can still trace its outline.

Before your 15 minutes are up, turn round. The wall behind you has a Crucifixion by Giovanni Donato da Montorfano, a Lombard painter of Leonardo’s day, and Leonardo added figures of the Sforza family to it in tempera.

Why the Last Supper is so fragile

Leonardo painted the Last Supper from about 1495 to 1498 for Ludovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan, whose court at the Sforza Castle also had the architect Bramante. He didn’t paint a fresco: he used tempera on a dry wall, so the colour never soaked into the plaster, and it began to come away within a few years. Accounts from 1517, 1568 and 1625 already describe serious damage.

The room had a rough time after that. In 1796 French troops used the refectory as an armoury and a stable, and on 15 August 1943 an Allied bombing raid destroyed much of it. The painted wall survived behind sandbags.

Nine restorations are recorded since the early 1700s. The older ones repainted whole sections, while those of the 20th century only consolidated the paint and treated the gaps. The last, led by the restorer Pinin Brambilla Barcilon, ran from 1978 to 1999, and the painting went back on show on 28 May 1999. Today the air in the refectory is monitored.

Santa Maria delle Grazie, the church next to the Last Supper

The Last Supper is in the convent, and the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie beside it is a separate visit, free to enter. Its nave was begun in 1463 and the church was finished in 1497, with the tribune and transepts attributed to Bramante, though that attribution is now debated. Since 1980 the church, the convent and the Last Supper have been a UNESCO World Heritage Site together.

Inside, the Chapel of the Holy Crown has frescoes by the Renaissance painter Gaudenzio Ferrari. Its altarpiece by Titian, painted in 1543, was carried off by French troops in 1797, and it’s now in the Louvre.

Getting to the Last Supper by metro or tram

The Last Supper is at Piazza Santa Maria delle Grazie 2. By metro, get off at Conciliazione on the M1, or at Cadorna on the M1 and M2. Tram 16 stops at S. Maria delle Grazie, and buses 50 and 169 stop on Via Boccaccio.

There’s a taxi rank at Via Ruffini 1, opposite the ticket office. If you’re driving, the church is inside Area C, the zone of central Milan where cars pay a charge to enter.