How To Buy Last Supper Tickets (Even When It's Sold Out)
“While painting The Last Supper, Leonardo would sometimes stare at the work for an hour, finally make one small stroke, and then leave."
’Leonardo Da Vinci’ by Walter Isaacson
Updated January 2026
Although you will only have fifteen precious minutes to admire the small strokes of Da Vinci's fragile fresco, the experience of viewing the The Last Supper is different to all other paintings and galleries.
One of the most famous and visited paintings in the world, it is held in a single dark room by a church and subject to strict environmental controls to support its preservation.
Due to this, only a maximum of 40 people are permitted in the room for every 15-minute time slot.
Whilst this means you have a wonderfully unhurried and uncrowded opportunity to really appreciate and contemplate the work, it does create serious pressures and challenges for finding tickets.
That’s where we want to help you.
In this short, practical guide, we’ve shared everything you need to know before buying your Last Supper tickets - and how to find them if it's all sold out for your Milan dates. There are a few options - some better and cheaper than others - so don't panic just yet if you've left it to the last minute!
We'll also share essential context for planning your visit, including how the time slots work, where to collect your tickets on the day, a few common mistakes to avoid, and the little-known trick that we used to see the Last Supper for free on a Sunday.
This is how to visit and buy your tickets for The Last Supper in Milan.
The Last Supper Essentials
What / Da Vinci's 15th century masterpiece of the Biblical scene
Where / Housed in a protected room next to Santa Maria delle Grazie church in central Milan
How / Strict 15-minute viewing slot in a single group of 40 people
When / Viewings from 8.15am to 7pm Tuesday to Sundays but closed Mondays
Cost / €15 full price, €2 reduced, free for under 18s and some others
Buy / Tickets released in quarterly blocks on official website, with advance reservations mandatory - tickets not available to purchase on day
Availability / Tickets sell out weeks & months in advance, but Wednesdays at 12pm is the best day to check for additional releases on the official website
Tours / Various tours have last-minute tickets available - like this one and this one- but spaces limited & prices can become very expensive
Know / All tickets need to be collected at The Last Supper Museum before your time slot, with ID required
Plan / Best place to check current availability & buy tickets is official Cenacolo Vinciano website
The Last Supper Time Slots & Maximum Capacities
The most important thing to know at the outset is that The Last Supper isn't found in a normal museum or gallery with dozens of rooms and hundreds of other paintings.
Instead, it is on the back wall of the same dark monastery dining hall where Da Vinci created it in the 1490s, and there is nothing else to see or take your attention away except a lonely painting on the opposing side.
To witness the masterpiece in its original setting by Santa Maria delle Grazie church is certainly part of the magic, but this is no ordinary room or artistic viewing experience.
Due to the methods and materials he used, The Last Supper is incredibly fragile. Much work has been done to preserve and restore it over the centuries - not always uncontroversial - and the room is now subject to strict environmental controls on air, light, temperature, and moisture.
For today's visitor, this means:
· Last Supper tickets are sold according to strict entry/exit time slots
· Advance bookings are required, whether it's a full price, reduced price, student ticket, or a free one for concessions
· A maximum of 40 people* are permitted in the room per time slot
· You will have 15 minutes in the room with The Last Supper
· After the time is up, the whole group has to leave the room: no re-entry or lingering is permitted
We would understand if the above sounds like a negative but, trust us when we say that this level of control and limits on numbers significantly enhances the experience. In contrast to other museums and galleries where hordes of people stand in front of one famous painting simply to take a photo of themselves in front of it (such as at the Louvre for another of Da Vinci's works or the entirety of the Vatican Museum), you are able to stop, contemplate, look, move, look, and really appreciate in a stress-free setting.
And, with the room being quite big, there really is plenty of space for everyone and no distinction about whether you see the Last Supper in the first, middle, or last time slot of the day.
We actually wish more places took such a serious approach to limiting visitor numbers to both protect the works, but also significantly improve the individual and collective experience.
Know // The old dining hall of Santa Maria delle Grazie church is now known as Museo del Cenacolo Vinciano (The Last Supper Museum) - find it here on Google Maps. There's a tram stop right outside, whilst it's a 5-minute walk from Conciliazione metro station, and 10-minutes from San Amborigo metro station.
*The maximum group size was only recently increased from 25 to 40!
When & Where To Buy Your Last Supper Tickets
However, the downside of the time slots and limits on numbers is that tickets often sell out months in advance: almost every first-time visitor to Milan hopes to see the painting, and supply simply cannot keep up with demand.
There are also various companies that bulk buy multiple tickets in advance, further restricting availability.
This means you have to be more organised or lucky than usual to secure your place, but if you're planning for Milan a few months in advance of your arrival, you should be fine.
(if you're on this blog post because you are trying to visit in the next few days and tickets are already gone, stick around for specific advice on what to do)
Tickets are released in quarterly blocks on the official Cenacolo Vinciano ticket website on the following timeframes:
March / bookings open for May, June and July
June / bookings open for August, September and October
September / bookings open for November, December and January
December / bookings open for February, March and April
This means the buying window opens every three months, and as much as three months before your potential visit dates, with allocations snapped up quickly by individuals, tour groups, and a variety of companies.
For certain months, they’re gone in a flash - within 48 hours on the last release date!
The booking window for each quarterly period tends to open on a Wednesday at 12pm Italian time (e.g. for the May, June, and July bookings, it opened on the 20th March), and it is not possible to view availability or making any bookings for any subsequent quarterly blocks.
So, if you're visiting Milan in September or October, you have to wait until that quarterly booking window opens up in mid-June!
Demand is consistent throughout the year, but obviously spikes in the peak Italian travel months of May to October when it is not uncommon for the entire quarterly block to be sold out when you first look - even if your dates are weeks or months away.
For example, when we looked on the 20th May for our June trip, every single day until the 31st July was sold out. However, on Wednesday 29th May, a whole block of tickets for June 4th-9th became 'green' and available, but were gone just as quick (spoiler alert: we did eventually secure tickets).
If time is on your side and you know your dates in Milan, then these are your next steps for finding + buying tickets:
Check availability and book tickets on the official website. Select the ‘Are you a single visitor or a family group?’ option, where you are permitted to buy up to five tickets in a single transaction. The tickets do not all have to be for the same time slot.
If everything is sold out, don't panic yet. Additional tickets are exclusively released on the official website every Wednesday at 12pm Italian time, primarily for the upcoming week, so set a reminder to check back then every week and refresh often.
However, we do appreciate there's an element of risk to leaving it to this option for last-minute tickets.
If the quarterly booking block is not yet open for your specific Milan dates, we highly recommend setting a reminder in your calendar diary for the day the next quarterly block is released so you can be ready and waiting on your computer! You can see the specific date + time of the next quarterly block release on this page.
There are unfortunately a variety of websites masquerading as the official one, and they operate solely to sell you expensive alternatives. To keep things clear, the Last Supper Museum / Cenacolo Vinciano website is available here, and it has lots of visitor information.
For selling tickets and listing availability, their official partner is a company called Vivaticket.
It's a platform used by many museums, galleries, and music venues in Italy, so defaults to Italian. You can easily change the language settings in the top right corner of the website, but for ease, we’ve shared the specific English language page for buying Last Supper tickets here.
One final point: if you manage to find tickets, make sure to use a bank card that won’t charge extortionate fees for foreign transactions or currency conversions, and note that there are no refunds or changes to the date or time once you've bought them.
Top Tip // It’s 12pm Italian time, so make sure your geographical time difference calculations are accurate! Going via the website is the quickest and easiest option, and we 100% recommend trying to do it on desktop or laptop rather than mobile for a more intuitive experience. However, you are also able to contact The Last Supper Museum ticket office on +39 02 92800360 to enquire and purchase over the phone. This method also permits you to buy as many as 9 tickets, instead of the maximum 5 on the website. However, note that it’s an Italian number, so ensure you're using a phone line that won't see costs rack up!
There is also the option to e-mail them at cenacologruppi@adartem.it, but we didn’t try this step - let us know in the comments if you do and are successful.
Last Supper Tickets Sold Out? Here's What To Do.
If you're out of luck, or are looking for a last-minute ticket, you still have options.
The best next step is to go with one of the Last Supper tours which include guaranteed skip-the-line-tickets.
It's a frustrating solution as the organised bulk buying by these companies is partially responsible for the lack of Last Supper tickets in the first place, but it's the main way to increase your chance of seeing Da Vinci’s painting.
So, if you find that tickets for The Last Supper are all sold out, your next step is to jump on to one of four websites we both use and trust, in order to see if you can land a spot on a tour instead:
· Viator
· Tiqets
If you want to save time, two of the most affordable and highest-rated options we found are:
1. This option with GetYourGuide, which is significantly cheaper than the others
2. This is the most popular option on Viator and includes a guided tour of Milan
Both of these offer free cancellation up to 24 hours before which make them a good ‘Plan B’ if you’re waiting on last-minute tickets to become available.
Before you get those hopes too high though, it's important to be aware of a few points about Last Supper ‘tours’:
· they often sell out as well, or only have just a single place remaining in the group last-minute
· the price is considerably more than the €15 full-price/€2 reduced ticket, and can be inflated to quite ridiculous levels when there are only a few spots remaining
· Some providers really take the piss, offering little more than a person meeting you outside to give you the tickets and then an audioguide or a brief talk before / after. They're simply cashing in on people paying more than the market rate to secure a ticket, and not primarily focussed on giving you a meaningful or insightful experience.
Therefore, it’s important to properly read the descriptions to avoid disappointment, but for many of you the priority may be just getting in to stand before the masterpiece.
The best value for money and experience balance will therefore be choosing a tour which actually values you and your cultural curiosity, and perhaps includes one or two more stops in addition to The Last Supper. For example, this small-group Walks of Italy tour pairs it with a skip-the-line guided tour of the Duomo and historic Milan with an expert local guide.
Queuing For Returned Tickets
Can you get Last Supper tickets at the door? No. Due to advance reservations being required, the strict timeslots, and limits on group sizes, it is not possible to just turn up on the day to queue to buy a ticket.
Whilst you can do that for lots of popular place in Italy like the Colosseum, Michelango’s David, and Pompeii, it’s simply not an option for The Last Supper.
However, there is a very slim chance that you will be able to turn up early and buy a returned ticket for later in the day if you are very lucky.
When we joined the queue at 8am to collect our tickets from the The Last Supper Museum Ticket Office (maps), there was a sign at the front stating 'NO RETURN TICKETS TODAY’. We asked the attendant about this, and he said that there are sometimes last-minute returns or cancellations that have not been resold on the website.
If people show up when the ticket office opens, they have the opportunity to nab them.
However, he also said it is not very common and there are very few available if there are returns.
So, we wanted to share that nugget with you just in case you're a risk taker, priced out of the tours, or there's simply no availability on any of the other last minute options. The ticket office is open from 8am Tuesday to Sunday, and we'd suggest phoning them the day before to check about cancellations or getting there first thing on the day.
If you succeed, then do let us know in the comments!
Special Entry Sundays
Want to know how we managed to get free tickets for the first time slot of the day, just FIVE days before our visit to Da Vinci's masterpiece?
Well, like many others in Italy and across Europe, The Last Supper Museum offers free entry on the first Sunday of each month. After much researching, refreshing, and making peace with the fact that we would have to spend much more on a tour, one half of Along Dusty Roads had a lightbulb moment that we'd be in the city on the first Sunday!
What's more, those free tickets are only released at 12pm (Italian time) the preceding Wednesday, and only sold on the official website, so they are tailor-made for last-minute trips and purchases.
Tour groups are also (in theory at least) banned, so there is much greater availability overall.
If the stars and dates align for you, then check out the 'Special Entry Days' page on the official website. Andrew set a reminder to be logged on and waiting 10 minutes beforehand on the Wednesday, and accidentally managed to beat the queue by clicking on the previous month's button which opened up the sales page at 12:01pm, meaning we nabbed two tickets for the first entry at 8:15am! The correct button didn’t work until 12:11pm.
We couldn't quite believe we got them, so we hope it's an option for a bunch of you too - and if it works, then let us know on Instagram or buy us a coffee to say thanks.
Travel Tip // At the final stage of buying tickets on the official websites, it may the following error: ‘WARNING: Missing some fields’. All you need to do is scroll up to the ‘ingressi ingresso’ section near the top, click on the black icon with a white silhouette, and enter the names for each visitor.
How To Collect Last Supper Tickets
All tickets are personal, not transferrable and, when buying them on the official website, you'll be asked to provide the name of each individual for whom you're purchasing.
Every visitor is also required to collect tickets in person on the day from the Last Supper Museum Ticket Office, which is also in Piazza di Santa Maria delle Grazie, just a few steps from the entrance to the gallery. Find it here on Google Maps.
To collect your tickets, you need to bring two things with you:
1. Identification
To ensure you're not simply collecting tickets in order to scalp or resell, you will be asked for ID. We brought driving licences just in case, but they were happy for us to just show photos of our passports on the mobile.
You may not be asked for everyone's ID, but it's best to prepare for that eventuality. For Last Supper tours, they will give you more specific details about ID requirements, meeting times, and whether your guide collects tickets on your behalf from the office.
2. Transaction Code
When booking through the official website or over the phone, you'll receive a confirmation e-mail and receipt, but not the actual tickets. Your unique transaction code is also in there, and that's what you need to show at the ticket office in order to collect your Last Supper tickets in Milan.
Note that it is not necessary to print out the confirmation e-mail or transaction code, as they just need you to show it on your phone at the collection desk.
It's recommend to turn up to the ticket office thirty minutes before your time slot to avoid a rush, stress, or delays, but for the first timeslot of the day we were fine showing up just 15 minutes before.
The queue can be quite long as it's filled with people collecting tickets for various time, but the attendants will announce and split it so that those collecting for the next time slot can get priority.
After you’ve got your tickets, you should then join the nearby queue to the entrance to the Last Supper Museum.
Our Tips For A Better Experience
· Humans have evolved - perhaps ‘devolved’ is more accurate - into pulling out their phone instantly when they stand before something famous or well-known. Most of the time, they take the photo, then move on.
Unsurprisingly, the first thing about 50% of our morning group did once the gallery was open was to pull out their phone to take a mediocre picture of a masterpiece, and then another.
The whole point of stressing about tickets and paying for tours is so that you can stand before it and see it with your actual eyes - and not with a screen between you and the painting.
So, follow our advice and leave the phone in your pocket, and make sure the first five minutes are only about admiring The Last Supper with your own eyes.
· Fifteen minutes is more than most would spend in front of most paintings. The beauty is that it gives you enough time to really look at the details and pick out elements you would never see on a screen or with a cursory two minutes in a large gallery. Beyond its reputation, The Last Supper is large enough and interesting enough for you to find many surprises or parts to dwell upon.
· The room is very well configured for those who wish to appreciate all angles in an unhurried fashion. When the doors open, most people will rush straight toward the painting. That’s the natural reaction, but you may prefer to go toward the back to see the full perspective, then go up close, to the sides and then step back again or stay up close (when you exit, you leave from the back of the room with the painting at the opposite site).
· No video or flash is permitted, and everyone should respect and enforce this. The staff are very good at reminding people of the rules, and we even saw them make a visitor delete the video off their phone after failing to heed warnings.
· No drink, food, or bags are permitted inside the viewing room, and you should leave them in the 40 to 50 digital lockers located in the ticket office.
· If you grab the first couple of slots and don’t have time for breakfast, there are a few cafes within a few minutes walk. However, we’d highly recommend avoiding Pasticceria San Carlo. It’s a really wonderful and elegant cafe with smartly dressed waiters, but we paid €16 for two cappuccinos and two very, very mediocre pastries. By far the most expensive breakfast we’ve ever had in Italy (and we’ve had hundreds!).
