I’m not going to go into the details of the painting itself. We all know it. We all love it.

Charles Nicholl, an old contemporary of mine at Cambridge, has written a whole book about Leonardo da Vinci and has some fascinating insights into the artist and his work. And we have, in fact, been encountering Leonardo for quite a long time.

We’ve walked through the hills around Vinci, which is almost obligatory if you have any interest in Leonardo. Last year, when we were in the beautiful Eastern European city of Kraków, we saw his Lady with an Ermine. We’ve encountered Leonardo in London, too. And then there was France, where Leonardo spent the final years of his life as the protégé of the King of France and where he eventually died.

So, Vinci here, Vinci there, Vinci everywhere.

But to have the Last Supper actually standing before us was something else altogether.

And, strangely enough, it brought me right back to those childhood days when I could simply walk into the refectory with my great-aunt, my grandmother and other friends and relatives.

“Let’s go and see the Last Supper.”

And off we went.

For them, however, it wasn’t simply a question of going to see a great painting. It was a religious experience.

That, I think, is one of the remarkable things about the Last Supper. You can approach it on so many different levels. There is the aesthetic level, the artistic level, the historical level — and, of course, the religious one.

There is also something fascinating about the history of the room itself.

Opposite Leonardo’s Last Supper is another important fresco, the Crucifixion, painted by Donato Montorfano. The contrast between the two is striking. The Crucifixion belongs very much to the tradition of the elaborate late-Gothic and early-Renaissance fresco, full of figures and detail and activity.

Leonardo, by contrast, simplified everything.

He brought the whole composition into perspective, organised the figures around the vanishing point and concentrated the drama on Christ and the Apostles. Instead of filling the scene with decorative incident, he created an extraordinary sense of order and psychological tension. He depicts the exact moment when Christ says “Truly I tell you, one of you will betray me.”.

But then you notice something else.

At the edge of the Crucifixion there is a jagged scar.

The refectory was bombed during the Second World War.

Just think about that for a moment.

A bomb was dropped on a building containing what is probably the most famous mural painting in the world.

This is the cruelty of war.

We are constantly horrified when we hear about the Taliban or ISIS destroying ancient monuments and works of art — the Bamiyan Buddhas, Palmyra and countless other examples. And rightly so.

But we have to be honest with ourselves.

We have done exactly the same thing.

Sometimes it has been through deliberate destruction, sometimes through neglect, sometimes through religious fanaticism, and sometimes through the sheer destructive folly of war.

We saw another particularly painful example in Padua.

We had gone there, like so many visitors, to see Giotto’s extraordinary frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel. We had had to plan the visit well in advance because access is so carefully controlled.

But next door, in the Church of the Eremitani, was another masterpiece — Mantegna’s great fresco cycle.

Or, rather, what remains of it.

The church was bombed in 1944, and much of Mantegna’s work was destroyed. Fragments of the frescoes survived, and I remember hearing that these pieces were still being preserved and studied, with the hope that one day technology might allow them to be digitally reconstructed.

Perhaps computers will eventually be able to put the pieces back together.

But no computer can put back what was actually lost.

And this is why I think we should be rather careful about condemning other cultures for destroying the artistic heritage of the past.

We have been remarkably good at destroying our own.

Think of Britain during the Reformation.

The destruction was not confined to cathedrals, monasteries and convents. What was inside them was destroyed too. Books were burned. Statues were smashed. Frescoes were hacked away.

We had once had some of the greatest traditions of medieval art in Europe. Opus Anglicanum, the extraordinary English tradition of medieval embroidery, is one example; so much of this heritage has disappeared.

Gone.

Gone.

Gone.

Anyway, back to Leonardo.

We had our fifteen minutes.

And they were wonderful fifteen minutes.

Absolutely wonderful.

People moved through rather quickly, but for me the time passed at exactly the right speed. I had waited all those years, after all, and suddenly there it was.

Leonardo’s Last Supper.

Then reality returned.

We had to work out how to get back.

Eventually we made our way to Rogoredo. Milano Rogoredo is particularly useful when travelling through Milan because it is on the main north-south railway route. If your train terminates in Milan, you generally end up at the great monument that is Milano Centrale — my “Babylonian Central Station”. But if you’re travelling through Milan as part of the wider European network, Rogoredo can be a much more convenient stopping point.

And, of course, there is the Metro connection.

Once again, however, we had to work things out.

We realised that we had arrived a little early and that there was actually an earlier train to Florence. So why not try to get on that one?

This is one of the things I rather like about travelling in Italy. There is often a certain flexibility.

We explained the situation, and an Italian couple helped us. In the end, we were allowed onto the train.

And what a difference it made.

It was much faster than the train we had originally expected to take. There were only two stops between Milan and Florence: Reggio Emilia and Bologna.

Then we crossed the Apennines.

We didn’t take the old mountain route, which climbed laboriously over the Apennines. Instead, we went through the great high-speed tunnels beneath them.

The contrast with the old railway is extraordinary. Rather than laboriously climbing over the mountains, the modern railway simply goes underneath them.

It is an astonishing piece of engineering.

And, eventually, we emerged on the other side and continued towards Florence.

But then came what was probably the most difficult part of the whole journey.

Getting home from Florence station.

Florence was busy with yet more tram-line construction, buses were being diverted, roads were closed and everything seemed to be in a state of permanent reconstruction.

So we asked people.

We consulted the information on my phone.

We used a bit of AI.

And, eventually, we found our way home.

By then we were footsore, exhausted and unbelievably hot.

And I thought to myself:

“Is this really how I’m going to spend my birthday?”

But when I woke up the next morning, I realised something.

No.

I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.

The heat, the delays, the Metro, the diversions, the endless walking, the confusion about trains — all of that was irrelevant compared with those fifteen minutes standing in front of Leonardo.

I would just prefer to have the experience next time in slightly more civilised climatic conditions.

So we slept soundly, and woke up with another little treasure to add to our archive of travel memories.

And, after all, another birthday treat.

Not a bad way to turn seventy-eight.

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