Around 1482 a thirty-year-old Florentine arrived in Milan offering his services as a military engineer. He stayed seventeen years working for Ludovico Sforza, il Moro, the man who pushed aside his own nephew and opened Italy's gates to the French armies. Thirteen stops between the church the duke wanted as his mausoleum, the wall where Leonardo painted the betrayal of Judas, its miraculous survival under the bombs, the vineyard il Moro gave him, the machines rebuilt from his notebooks, the Sforza castle, the room of mulberry trees, the painters of his court at Brera, the canal lock, the monument to his pupils, the codex of a thousand pages, the cathedral dome he never built and the courtyard where his giant horse once stood. Approximate audio duration: 27 minutes.
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Milán: Leonardo, La Última Cena y el duque que lo perdió todo
Hacia 1482 un florentino de treinta años llegó a Milán ofreciéndose como ingeniero militar. Se quedó diecisiete años al servicio de Ludovico Sforza, el Moro, el hombre que le quitó el poder a su sobrino y abrió las puertas de Italia a los ejércitos franceses. Trece paradas entre la iglesia que el duque quiso como mausoleo, la pared donde Leonardo pintó la traición de Judas, el milagro de su supervivencia bajo las bombas, la viña que le regaló el Moro, las máquinas reconstruidas de sus cuadernos, el castillo de los Sforza, la sala de las moreras, los pintores de su corte en Brera, la esclusa de los canales, el monumento a sus discípulos, el códice de mil hojas, la cúpula del Duomo que nunca construyó y el patio donde se levantó su caballo gigante. Duración aproximada de audio: 27 minutos.
Tour stops
13 stops · ~27 min of audio · 6.92 km on foot (~1 h 45 min walking) · about 2 h 15 min in total
You are standing before Santa Maria delle Grazie. Notice the contrast: a Gothic brick nave and, behind it, a huge round Renaissance tribune. They look like two buildings stuck together. In a way, they are.
The Dominicans built the church in the mid fifteenth century. But in 1492 Ludovico Sforza, the strongman of Milan, had the apse pulled down and this new tribune raised. Tradition credits it to Donato Bramante, his court architect.
Ludovico had a plan. He wanted this church to be his family's mausoleum. That is why he lavished such attention on the convent, and why he commissioned, in the f…
2
One of You Will Betray Me
You are in the old Dominican refectory, the hall where the friars ate in silence. At the far end, filling the whole wall, is The Last Supper. It is about four and a half metres high and nearly nine metres wide.
Leonardo painted it roughly between 1494 and 1498, commissioned by Ludovico. The friars ate looking at Christ eating with his disciples. The painted table continued, in the mind's eye, the real tables of the refectory.
Notice the moment he chose. It is not the institution of the Eucharist, as in almost every earlier Last Supper. It is the instant just after Jesus says: one of you will…
3
The Painting That Began Dying at Once
You are still in the refectory. If The Last Supper looks pale to you, almost ghostly, it is not your imagination. What you see is what survived five centuries of disasters.
The trouble began with Leonardo himself. A true fresco is painted quickly on wet plaster, and the colour is locked into the wall. But Leonardo hated to hurry. He wanted to come back, revise, think. So he painted on the dry wall, with tempera and oil.
The result was beautiful and fragile. Damp in the wall began lifting the paint while he was still alive. A few decades later, those who saw it already described it as badly d…
4
The Vineyard il Moro Gave Him
Cross Corso Magenta. You are in front of the Casa degli Atellani, a Renaissance palace almost opposite Santa Maria delle Grazie. Behind its courtyards lies something unexpected in the middle of a city: a vineyard.
Ludovico had given this house to a family of courtiers, the Atellani. And around 1498, while Leonardo was still working on the Supper, the duke gave him a plot of vineyard just behind it, about sixteen Milanese perches in size.
It was payment in kind. Ludovico paid late and badly, and Leonardo complained in writing about months of unpaid salary. A plot of his own, a short walk from…
5
The Machines That Left the Page
You are on Via San Vittore, in front of the National Museum of Science and Technology, named after Leonardo. It occupies a sixteenth century monastery, San Vittore al Corpo, which later served as a barracks and was badly damaged by the bombs of 1943.
The museum opened in 1953, marking five centuries since Leonardo's birth. Its treasure is a gallery of models built from the drawings in his notebooks: aerial screws, flapping wings, portable bridges, looms, cranes.
Look at those machines with a little caution. Many were never built in his lifetime, and some would not have worked exactly as draw…
6
A Military Engineer's Letter
You are facing the Castello Sforzesco. The tall central tower is the Torre del Filarete. It is not the original: that one blew up in 1521, when it was used to store gunpowder, and what you see is a reconstruction completed in the early twentieth century.
Francesco Sforza began the castle in 1450, on top of the old Visconti fortress. His son Ludovico turned it into one of the richest courts in Europe: musicians, poets, mathematicians, architects. Leonardo arrived in that world around 1482, at about thirty.
Before coming he wrote a letter, or had one written, that survives as a draft. In ten p…
7
The Room of Mulberry Trees
You have crossed the great parade ground and are in the Corte Ducale, the most private part of the castle. In one of its towers, the Torre Falconiera, is the Sala delle Asse, the room of boards. The name comes from the wooden panels that once lined its walls.
In 1498 Leonardo painted this room for Ludovico. A letter from April that year, by a court official, reports that master Leonardo promised to finish it by September.
Look up. The whole vault is an arbour of trees: trunks rising up the walls, their branches weaving together across the ceiling, tied with a golden cord that forms endless k…
8
His Colleagues at Court
You are in the courtyard of Palazzo di Brera. In the centre stands a bronze Napoleon, naked like a Roman god. It was he who turned this former Jesuit college into a museum in the early nineteenth century, filling it with paintings taken from churches and convents.
Upstairs is the Pinacoteca di Brera. You will not find a painting by Leonardo here. But you will find the people who worked beside him at Ludovico's court.
The most important is Donato Bramante, the architect of the tribune at Santa Maria delle Grazie. He painted very little, and one of his works is here: Christ at the Column, from…
9
The City of Canals
You are on Via San Marco, beside the Conca dell'Incoronata. Look at those two wooden gates in the still water. They are what remains of a lock built in the late fifteenth century, when a canal ran down this street.
Milan has no river. For centuries it made up for that with the Navigli, canals linking it to the Ticino and the Adda, and through them to the lakes and the Alps. By water came salt, timber, grain and the pink Candoglia marble used to build the cathedral.
The problem was the difference in level. For boats to go up or down, you needed locks: chambers that fill and empty. And the gat…
10
The Master and His Four Pupils
You are in Piazza della Scala. On one side, the opera house; opposite, Palazzo Marino, the city hall. In the middle, on a tall pedestal, Leonardo stands with arms folded and a long beard.
The monument is by Pietro Magni and was unveiled in 1872, a few years after Italy's unification. The new nation was looking for heroes, and Leonardo was ideal: Tuscan by birth, Milanese by his work.
Below, at the four corners, stand four of his Milanese pupils: Marco d'Oggiono, Cesare da Sesto, Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio and Gian Giacomo Caprotti, whom everyone knew as Salai.
Salai deserves a minute. He j…
11
The Codex of a Thousand Pages
You are in front of the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, on the small Piazza Pio XI. Cardinal Federico Borromeo founded it and it opened in 1609. It was one of the first libraries in Europe open to the public.
Here lies Leonardo's greatest written treasure: the Codex Atlanticus. It is not a book he put together. After his death his papers were scattered, and in the late sixteenth century the sculptor Pompeo Leoni glued hundreds of loose sheets onto large folios, the size of an atlas. Hence the name.
Today it has 1,119 sheets, with drawings and notes from some forty years of work: war machines, canals,…
12
The Dome Leonardo Never Built
You are in Piazza del Duomo, facing the cathedral. Raise your eyes above the facade, to the centre of the building. There, over the crossing, rises the highest spire, crowned by the golden Madonnina.
The cathedral was begun in 1386. When Leonardo arrived in Milan a century later, that point was still unresolved: the tiburio, the structure meant to close the crossing without its weight crushing the piers. It was an engineering problem no one had managed to solve.
Around 1487 the cathedral works opened a competition. Leonardo entered. He had a wooden model built and filled pages with drawings …
13
The Horse That Became Cannons
You are in front of Palazzo Reale, to the right of the cathedral. Its neoclassical facade dates from the eighteenth century. But in Leonardo's day this was the Corte Vecchia, the old Visconti palace. Here Ludovico gave Leonardo a workshop and a place to live.
In this courtyard the most ambitious project of his Milanese years took shape: the bronze horse he had promised in his letter, an equestrian monument to Francesco Sforza, il Moro's father. He worked on it for years, studying horses from the duke's stables.
In November 1493 the clay model, about seven metres high, was put on show for the…
How long does the "Milan: Leonardo, The Last Supper and the Duke Who Lost Everything" audio tour take?
It has about 27 minutes of audio across 13 stops and a 6.92 km walking route (~1 h 45 min on foot). Plan roughly 2 h 15 min in total, or split it up: you can pause and resume anytime.
Where does the tour start?
At stop 1, "The Church the Duke Wanted for His Tomb" (coordinates 45.46595, 9.1709). The app guides you from stop to stop with a map.
Is it free?
Trevurs is a free app for iOS and Android. There is also an optional Premium version, from USD 1.99, with unlimited offline downloads, access to every tour and no ads. It also helps keep an independent app alive.
Why use an audio tour instead of a guided group tour?
No group to keep up with and no guide to wait for. Start at any time of day, on your own schedule. Go at your own pace: pause, rewind or skip any stop. No need to commit 2 or 3 hours to a single tour: do one stop or the whole route. Works offline once downloaded.
What languages is this audio guide available in?
This tour is available in Spanish, English, Portuguese, French, Italian. Switch languages anytime from inside the app.
Do I need wifi to listen to this tour?
No. Download the tour over wifi before you go, then listen without any data connection.
How do I access this tour?
Download Trevurs on iPhone (App Store) or Android (Google Play), then open Milan and pick "Milan: Leonardo, The Last Supper and the Duke Who Lost Everything". No account required to start.
