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The church of Santa Maria delle Grazie stands in the center of Milan , beside a plain dining hall . Inside that hall there is one famous wall . On it , Leonardo da Vinci painted the Last Supper , the most studied dinner in the history of art . Leonardo worked on it between about 1495 and 1498 , in the refectory , the dining room of the Dominican convent . True fresco demands fast work on wet plaster , and Leonardo hated to hurry . He wanted to paint slowly and with corrections , so he invented his own dry technique . The experiment failed : within a few decades , the colors began to flake off the wall . When the Second World War reached Italy , the people of Milan feared for the fragile painting . Workers packed the wall behind sandbags , wooden scaffolding , and metal braces . It was quiet , careful work , and almost nobody outside the convent noticed it . On the night of 15–16 August 1943 , Allied planes bombed Milan , and one bomb hit the convent . The refectory 's roof collapsed and one main wall was destroyed , but the wall of the Last Supper survived behind its sandbags . The painting stayed under temporary cover while the room was rebuilt around it . The bomb was not its only enemy ; humidity , dust , and clumsy repainting had damaged it too . From 1978 to 1999 , the restorer Pinin Brambilla Barcilon cleaned the surface centimeter by centimeter , a project of twenty - one years . Today visitors enter a climate - controlled room in timed groups of about 35 people for 15 minutes . In 1980 , UNESCO placed the church and convent , with the painting , on its World Heritage list . The Last Supper has survived a failed technique , five centuries of decay , and a falling bomb . It is still there on the same wall , exactly where Leonardo chose to paint it , saved by sandbags and quiet hands .
