A copy of the "Last Supper" by Leonardo da Vinci, of which we do not know with certainty neither author nor time, was discovered some time ago in the refectory of the Capuchin monastery of Saracena, a town in the province of Cosenza, on Mount Pollino, abandoned for years. The news was spread on Facebook by the associations "Mystery Hunters" and "Mistyca Calabria". The convent, reachable only on foot, was founded in 1588 and gained importance in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, becoming the seat of the novitiate and place of study. For example, Angelo d’Acri (born Lucantonio Falcone, an Italian presbyter, was declared blessed by Pope Leo XII) spent a year there. The structure closed in 1915, and from 1917 to 1918 it was used as a prison. To attribute the mural to the Apulian painter Giacomo Bissanti (1822-1879), already working in the Calabrian town, in the sixteenth-century church of Santa Maria del Gamio (that is of divine Love), is today the historian Vincenzo Napolillo in an article in the periodical of the archdiocese of Cosenza "Word of Life".
According to the reconstruction of the scholar, on which not everyone agrees, Bissanti, commissioned by the Capuchins, reproduced with great skill and fidelity the monumental fresco preserved in the original, in Milan, in the Renaissance ex-refectory of the convent adjacent to the sanctuary of Santa Maria delle Grazie. "And the reproduction – Napolillo specifies – is of excellent workmanship, even if the author did not want to attribute it to himself, having probably taken it from a print of the time so as not to take anything away from the majesty of the original".
