---
node: spot_milan_santa_maria_delle_grazie
type: spot
slug: santa_maria_delle_grazie
destination: dest_milan
title: "Santa Maria delle Grazie"
lead: "The refectory of this Dominican convent holds Leonardo's Last Supper, painted on the wall between 1495 and 1498. Only thirty-five people are admitted at a time, for fifteen minutes, and tickets are released months ahead."
published: 2026-08-12
updated: 2026-08-12
image_file: spot_milan_santa_maria_delle_grazie.jpg
image_source: "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Milan_SantaMariaGrazie_016_3553.jpg"
image_author: "Ludvig14"
image_license: "CC BY-SA 4.0"
---

## Overview

Leonardo painted it in tempera on dry plaster rather than in true fresco, so that he could work slowly and revise, and it began deteriorating within his lifetime. What survives is perhaps a fifth of his own paint, stabilised by a twenty-year restoration that ended in 1999. An Allied bomb destroyed the refectory roof and one wall in August 1943; the painting had been sandbagged and survived. The church itself, with Bramante's tribune, is free and almost always empty.

## Highlights

Book the moment the quarter's tickets open, which is the only reliable way in; agencies resell at several times the price. Arrive twenty minutes early, since entry is by airlocked chambers that control humidity and latecomers lose the slot. Go into the church afterwards for Bramante's dome, which most Last Supper visitors never see.