Leonardo da Vinci Museum, Milan: Which One You Mean

If you have searched for a Leonardo da Vinci museum in Milan — or musée Léonard de Vinci Milan, or just Leonardo3 — you have probably ended up on two different sets of tickets without noticing. There are two museums, 15 minutes apart, both legitimately named after him, and choosing wrong is the difference between an hour of fun and half a day of engineering. Neither one owns an original Leonardo: for that you need The Last Supper and the Castello’s Sala delle Asse, both covered further down.

Which one you want

Prices checked September 2026.

The honest one-line answer: if it is your first trip and you have two days, take Leonardo3 for the hour and skip the science museum. If you have four days, or a child over eight, the science museum is the better museum by some distance.

Leonardo3 — the hour in the Galleria

The entrance is off Piazza della Scala, at the Galleria end, which makes it the most conveniently placed museum in Milan: you are already walking past it between the Duomo and Brera. According to the official site (leonardo3.net), it is open daily 09:30–21:00 — worth underlining, because almost nothing else in central Milan opens on Monday.

What is inside is one well-made exhibition rather than a collection. Physical working models built from the codices — the mechanical lion that walks, the time regulator, the paddle boat, the flying machines — most of which you can operate. Alongside them are digital restorations of the paintings, including a room-scale reconstruction of The Last Supper that lets you see the composition properly, which is more than the 15 minutes in front of the real thing allows.

The €16 ticket is identical on Tiqets and GetYourGuide, includes an audio guide in seven languages, and covers the whole exhibition. Allow an hour, 90 minutes if you read everything and your children press every lever.

Here the partner price is the better one, which almost never happens. The museum’s own shop (leonardo3.regiondo.it, reached from the Buy Tickets button on leonardo3.net) sells a single €15 entry ticket and treats the audio guide as a €5 add-on, offered in Italian, English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian and Chinese. So €16 with the audio guide included beats €20 for the same two things. Reductions and family rates are not published on the official shop’s ticket page — if you think you qualify for one, ask at the desk in the Galleria before you buy anything online.

Museo Nazionale Scienza e Tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci — half a day, properly

Via San Vittore 21, in a 16th-century Olivetan monastery beside the church of San Vittore, five minutes from metro Sant’Ambrogio. It is Italy’s largest science and technology museum and holds roughly 19,000 objects, according to the official site (museoscienza.org). The Leonardo galleries are the anchor — the largest permanent display devoted to him anywhere — with historical models built from the drawings and a serious treatment of what he did and did not actually invent.

Then it keeps going. Railway locomotives under a roof. Aeronautics. A full transatlantic liner bridge. Telecommunications from telegraph to mobile phone. Clock-making, printing, metallurgy, space. And in the outdoor Padiglione Aeronavale, the submarine Enrico Toti, which you walk through end to end — the visit must be booked online at the same time as your ticket, and only one guided activity plus the Toti can be reserved per booking.

Official prices are €13 full and €8 reduced. Both Tiqets and GetYourGuide also sell it at €13, so the partner ticket costs nothing extra and gives you a smartphone voucher instead of the desk queue. Note two rules from the official ticketing page: visitors under 14 must be accompanied by an adult, and at weekends entry is not guaranteed without an online ticket. The basic chemistry section is currently closed.

The Toti and the guided activities work through the official Vivaticket flow rather than as extras you add later: the checkout runs entry ticket, then Toti, then activities, and booking them is only possible at the moment you buy. You can reserve one guided activity plus the Toti visit per booking, nothing more, and if a child under 14 is in the party an adult must be booked onto the same activity. What each slot costs and which are left shows on those steps — so open the checkout before you commit to a date.

The actual Leonardo works in Milan

Leonardo spent roughly 17 years in Milan across two stays, working for Ludovico Sforza and later the French. Two things he made are still where he made them.

The Last Supper (Cenacolo Vinciano), 1495–1498, in the refectory beside Santa Maria delle Grazie. Painted in tempera on dry plaster rather than true fresco, which is why it started deteriorating within his lifetime. Visits are timed, 15 minutes, in small groups, and closed Mondays. Official tickets are sold only through Vivaticket and released in batches months ahead, where they go in minutes; the realistic route for most travellers is a guided tour that includes a reserved ticket. The whole mechanism is explained on The Last Supper.

The Sala delle Asse, in the Castello Sforzesco: a ceiling Leonardo painted around 1498 as a canopy of mulberry branches knotted with gold rope, plus the monochrome Monocromo wall drawing. It is inside the Musei del Castello ticket, alongside Michelangelo’s Pietà Rondanini — see Castello Sforzesco. Closed Mondays. Restoration has run in phases, so check what is visible before you go.

The Codex Atlanticus — the largest bound collection of his drawings — is at the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, two minutes from the Duomo, shown in rotation. It is on our museum round-up at Milan museums.

Tickets: official, Tiqets, GetYourGuide or a bundle

There is effectively no markup at partner prices, which is unusual and makes the decision easy: book wherever your other tickets are. At Leonardo3 the €1 gap over the official €15 buys you the audio guide the official shop charges €5 for; at the science museum the price is the same either way. The only reason to use the official science-museum checkout is the €8 reduced rate or a specific guided activity slot. How the two platforms differ on refunds and vouchers is set out on /platforms/tiqets/ and /platforms/getyourguide/.

If you have not yet bought Duomo tickets (Duomo tickets), the 5% bundles are free money — the two visits stay independent, you just pay less.

Timing

Leonardo3: go after 18:00. It stays open to 21:00, the Galleria is beautiful at that hour, and school groups are long gone. It is also the strongest Monday option in central Milan, when the Cenacolo, Brera and the Castello museums are all closed.

Science museum: be there at 09:30 on a weekday. The Toti and the interactive labs fill first, and the museum shuts at 17:00 Tuesday to Friday with last entry at 16:00 — a 15:00 arrival is not enough time. Weekends run an hour later, 09:30–18:30, and are much busier; book online.

Both are indoor, which makes them the obvious answer to a wet November afternoon.

Getting there and combining

Leonardo3 needs no directions: metro Duomo (M1, M3), walk through the Galleria, keep going to the Piazza della Scala end. Combine it with the Duomo terraces, La Scala (La Scala) or Brera (Pinacoteca di Brera) — everything is within ten minutes.

The science museum is metro Sant’Ambrogio (M2), five minutes on foot, and it sits next to two things worth the walk: the Basilica of Sant’Ambrogio, and Santa Maria delle Grazie ten minutes north. If you have a Last Supper slot, put the science museum in the same half-day — same neighbourhood, and you will already be there.

A clean Leonardo day: 08:15 Last Supper slot, coffee, science museum until 13:00, lunch, then Leonardo3 in the evening on the way back through the Galleria.

So: Leonardo3 for an hour of machines you can turn with your hands, open every day and open late, €16. The Museo Nazionale Scienza e Tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci for a genuine half-day museum at €13 with the Toti submarine in the yard. And if what you actually want is Leonardo’s own hand, book The Last Supper first and build the rest of the trip around the slot you get.