Leonardo da Vinci at Sforza Castle: the Sala delle Asse

Hours and prices below were checked on 14 August 2026. Museums change them at short notice — confirm on milanocastello.it before you travel.

Read this before you plan around the Sala delle Asse

Almost every guide to Sforza Castle promises you a Leonardo room. What most of them fail to say is that the Sala delle Asse has spent years under restoration and is not a room you simply walk into with a museum ticket.

As of August 2026 the restoration is in its final phase, and access is handled through a specific programme rather than general admission: timed visits that take small groups up onto the scaffolding to see the painted vault from close range, plus a multimedia presentation elsewhere in the castle. Dates and capacity are limited and are published on a calendar.

This is genuinely a better experience than the room normally offers — from the scaffolding you are a few centimetres from Leonardo's brushwork rather than fifteen metres below it — but it is not something you can count on turning up and doing. If Leonardo is your reason for visiting Milan, check the calendar first and build the day around the slot you can get, not the other way round.

What the Sala delle Asse actually is

It is a ground-floor room in the Torre Falconiera, painted by Leonardo around 1498–1499 for Ludovico Sforza. Leonardo covered the walls and vault with sixteen mulberry trees whose branches interlace overhead into a continuous painted canopy, knotted with a gold rope that runs through the whole design without ever breaking.

The mulberry is not decoration for its own sake. Moro means both “mulberry” and “the Moor” — Ludovico's nickname — so the room is a pun rendered in botany, executed with the accuracy of someone who had studied how a branch actually joins a trunk. That combination of courtly flattery and scientific observation is about as pure a statement of Leonardo's Milan years as survives anywhere.

The monochrome

Under later plaster on the north-east wall is a large monochrome drawing — roots gripping and splitting rock — uncovered and studied during the restoration campaigns. It is unfinished, closer to a full-scale working drawing than a painting, and it is the strongest surviving evidence of Leonardo's hand in the room. Much of the coloured foliage above has been repainted so heavily over the centuries that what most visitors photograph is substantially a nineteenth-century restoration.

That is worth knowing before you go, because the honest description of the Sala delle Asse is “a Leonardo design, mostly repainted, with one astonishing patch of the real thing.” It makes the visit more interesting, not less.

Leonardo in Milan: why he was here at all

Leonardo arrived in Milan around 1482 and stayed, on and off, until 1499, then returned between 1508 and 1513. He did not come as a painter. His letter of introduction to Ludovico Sforza is a military-engineering pitch: portable bridges, siege equipment, methods for diverting water. Painting and sculpture appear at the end, almost as an afterthought.

The court gave him what Florence hadn't — salary, materials, and problems worth solving. What survives in and near Milan from those years:

• The Last Supper (1495–1498) — in the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie, a 15-minute walk from the castle. Requires its own timed ticket, usually booked weeks ahead.
• The Sala delle Asse (1498–1499) — here.
• The Sforza horse — a colossal equestrian monument to Francesco Sforza. The full-size clay model stood for years; the bronze went to cannon when the French invaded. It was never cast.
• The Navigli studies — engineering work on Milan's canal system, including locks whose principle is still in use.

The Leonardo3 combined ticket: is it worth it?

You will be offered a bundle pairing the castle with the Leonardo3 Museum near Piazza della Scala. Be clear about what that is: Leonardo3 holds no original works by Leonardo. It is a well-made interactive museum of physical reconstructions built from the codices, plus digital restorations of paintings held elsewhere.

That is a legitimate and enjoyable thing to visit — children in particular get far more out of working machines than out of a painted ceiling. But it is a different category of experience from standing in front of an original, and the combined ticket costs several times the €5 castle admission. Buy it if you want the machines. Don't buy it under the impression that it is more Leonardo.

If the Sala delle Asse is closed on your dates

• The Pinacoteca's Leonardeschi room. Works by painters trained in or shaped by Leonardo's workshop — the clearest picture anywhere of how far his manner spread through Lombardy. Included in the standard museum ticket.
• The multimedia presentation. Covers the room's history and the Sforza court context. Not a substitute for the painting, but it is where the restoration findings get explained properly.
• Santa Maria delle Grazie. The Last Supper, 15 minutes on foot. Book well in advance; walk-ups almost never work.
• The Biblioteca Ambrosiana. Holds the Codex Atlanticus and Leonardo's Portrait of a Musician. Consistently under-visited and about 20 minutes' walk from the castle.

Practical notes

Museum hours are Tuesday to Sunday, 10:00–17:30, last admission 16:30, closed Mondays. Standard admission is €5, reduced €3. The courtyards are free and open 07:00–19:30 daily, so you can see the Torre Falconiera from outside without a ticket at all.

Scaffolding visits to the Sala delle Asse are ticketed separately from museum admission, run to their own calendar, and sell out. Nothing on this page changes that — check the dates first.