Why you should experience Orfeo Multisala in Milan, Italy.
Orfeo Multisala is a storied movie theater where Solari's industrial character meets nearly ninety years of Milanese cinema culture, a formidable chapter of international live music and the city's largest cinema screen inside one of the few historic theaters to survive the transition into multiplex exhibition.
Set along Viale Coni Zugna near Via Solari and just steps from Parco Solari, the movie theater occupies a broad western-central corridor where early twentieth-century apartment blocks, former industrial territory and the cultural institutions extending toward Tortona give way to the residential streets above the Navigli. The contemporary entrance leads into three auditoriums of sharply different scale, culminating in the 720-seat Sala Rossa and its immense screen. Digital projection and surround sound give current releases the audiovisual scale expected of a modern multiplex. Sala Rossa's proportions preserve something of the physical impact associated with the enormous postwar Orfeo, maintaining a sense of cinematic performance beyond the smaller screening rooms elsewhere in the complex. The result is a Solari movie theater where modern exhibition technology inhabits the successor to a vast single-screen hall that once moved effortlessly between films and major concerts.
What you should know about Orfeo Multisala.
Orfeo Multisala is best known for surviving a history that began in 1936, endured wartime destruction and eventually turned one of Milan's largest single-screen cinemas into a three-auditorium multiplex. Programming ceased after bombing damaged the building in 1943, and Orfeo remained closed until its postwar reopening in 1949. That reconstructed theater held 2,500 spectators and possessed an enormous screen regarded as the largest in Milan and among the largest in Europe. Architectural drawings from the postwar reconstruction carry the stamp of architect Mario Cavallé's Milan studio, connecting the building's physical revival with a practitioner whose archive preserves plans of the stalls, facade and upper levels. A further intervention in 1959 altered the screen and rebuilt perimeter walls and the roof under architect Giuseppe Chinigher, with structural testing involving the Politecnico di Milano and construction extending from August into October. Orfeo spent portions of the 1950s moving between second- and third-run film exhibition before returning to second-run status at the end of 1959 and becoming a first-run theater in 1987. Its enormous auditorium had already acquired a second cultural life through concerts, with Gerry Mulligan, Stan Getz, Dizzy Gillespie, Ornette Coleman with Don Cherry, James Brown, Lou Reed, Depeche Mode, Leonard Cohen, Tina Turner, Pat Metheny, Sonny Rollins and Paco de Lucía among the performers who appeared there. Italian musicians including Francesco De Gregori, Gino Paoli, Ornella Vanoni, Enrico Ruggeri, Anna Oxa and Roberto Vecchioni extended that chapter beyond the international touring circuit. The original large hall eventually gave way to a new three-screen configuration inaugurated in December 2004, creating the 720-seat Sala Rossa and two 290-seat auditoriums, Sala Blu and Sala Verde. Orfeo entered its contemporary phase with digital 3D, 2K, 4K and HFR projection alongside Dolby Digital Surround 7.1, allowing a cinema born before World War II to remain active through successive technological eras.
Sala Rossa carries the clearest physical connection with Orfeo's historic appetite for scale through a screen covering 150 square meters and a capacity of 720 spectators. Digital 4K projection gives that surface the resolution required for contemporary theatrical releases, and Dolby Digital Surround 7.1 distributes sound around the auditorium instead of concentrating it behind the image. Sala Verde reduces the room to 289 seats and a nine-by-five-meter screen, placing 120 centimeters between rows and leaving six meters between the first row and the image. Its Christie 4K projector works with a tri-amplified audio installation producing 14,380 watts RMS through 56 speakers, including eleven units behind the screen and fourteen surround cabinets. Sala Blu provides the third auditorium at a comparable scale, allowing simultaneous programming without reducing the principal hall to multiplex proportions. Orfeo also adapted to changing accessibility requirements through an induction system in Sala Rossa that sends film audio directly to compatible hearing aids. The three-room configuration consequently moves from the immense visual field of Sala Rossa into smaller auditoriums whose projection and audio systems preserve a technically substantial cinema experience across different audience sizes.
How to fold Orfeo Multisala into your trip.
Orfeo Multisala works as the film anchor for a Solari itinerary tracing western-Central Milan from an ancient sacred site radically reconstructed by Renaissance architects through the twentieth-century conversion of its monastery into Italy's principal science museum and onward to the Sforza patronage that brought Bramante and Leonardo together at Santa Maria delle Grazie.
Begin at San Vittore al Corpo, whose site reaches into late Roman Milan through a fourth-century octagonal imperial mausoleum associated with the area around the early Christian basilica. Benedictines occupied the complex during the medieval period before the Olivetans assumed control in the sixteenth century, when Vincenzo Seregni and Galeazzo Alessi shaped its Renaissance reconstruction; the church subsequently accumulated elaborate stucco, frescoes and paintings by Lombard artists including Camillo and Ercole Procaccini, Daniele Crespi and Guglielmo Caccia. Continue into Museo Nazionale Scienza e Tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci, occupying the adjoining former Olivetan monastery after a radically different institutional sequence carried the complex through military use and wartime destruction. Napoleon converted the monastery into a military hospital in 1805, Austrian and Italian armies subsequently used it as barracks, bombing struck again in 1943 and postwar reconstruction preceded the museum's inauguration on February 15, 1953 across a 50,000-square-meter site conceived as an unusually broad center for science, technology, education and public culture. Conclude at Santa Maria delle Grazie, where Gaspare Vimercati donated land to the Dominicans and construction began under Guiniforte Solari in 1463 before Ludovico il Moro recast the complex as a statement of Sforza patronage. Donato Bramante transformed the church through its tribune, apses, dome and cloister, and Ludovico commissioned Leonardo da Vinci to paint The Last Supper in the refectory between 1495 and 1497, joining architecture, dynastic ambition and one of the Renaissance's defining works within the same convent. The progression moves from San Vittore's late Roman origins and Renaissance reconstruction through the former Olivetan monastery's conversion from military complex into a national science museum and culminates in Ludovico il Moro's commissions to Bramante and Leonardo at Santa Maria delle Grazie.
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