The Last Supper

Tickets to view Leonardo Da Vinci’s The Last Supper are limited and often sold out as soon as they are released for sale online because church deliberately restricts crowd numbers to help preserve the masterpiece. When I checked, The Last Supper was booked out into May. Given this development, I decided to book a guided tour through an agency at a steep markup to the ticket price.

This mornings I made my way to the Santa Maria delle Grazie and met our guide Sylva. When the entire group had checked in, she guided us through security screening and then led us in an informative tour of the church and its most famous painting. Sylva told us about the history of The Last Supper, how da Vinci experimented with painting techniques in plaster and the outcomes of his experimentation (spoiler alert: it wasn’t great), and restoration efforts. When we were finally in front of the masterpiece, she pointed out its contents and their significance, and she pointed out various visual features. She also talked about the painting on the other end of the hall - The Crucifixion by Giovanni Donato de Montorfano - and drew comparisons between the two in terms of technique and their subsequent impact.

After viewing the paintings, Sylva showed us the church itself, which started out as a Lombardy-style Gothic and ended up being conjoined with a newer, renaissance style church.

Considering how next-to-impossible to secure ordinary tickets, I don’t regret paying a premium for this experience.Read more