Why you should experience Admiral Hotel in Milan, Italy.
Admiral Hotel is an eccentric art hotel where CityLife's fairground heritage, sporting culture, architectural reinvention and contemporary skyline meet a family-run Milan address filled with cinema, motors and collectible art.
Set along Via Domodossola near Viale Severino Boezio and just steps from CityLife, the hotel occupies the edge of Milan's former Fiera district, where the permanent fairgrounds established during the 1920s eventually surrendered 366,000 square meters to a new quarter planned by Zaha Hadid, Arata Isozaki and Daniel Libeskind, placing a hotel built during the old exhibition era beside one of the largest architectural reinventions in modern Milan. Sixty individually conceived rooms turn the interior in another direction, moving through cinema, sport, music, fashion, comics and motor racing amid objects collected across decades. Display cases, themed furnishings and pop-cultural artifacts give the property the density of a private collection whose contents have gradually escaped into the guestrooms. The result is a hotel where the spectacular redevelopment outside meets an equally personal world inside, preserving a distinctly independent presence beside towers that arrived decades after the Dell'Orto family.
What you should know about Admiral Hotel.
Admiral Hotel is best known for turning the Dell'Orto family's passions into one of Milan's strangest hotel collections, with James Bond memorabilia forming a particularly deep strand inside a property founded by Cavaliere Luigi Dell'Orto in 1972 and still operated by the third family generation. Luigi belonged to the family behind Dell'Orto, the carburetor manufacturer established in 1933 by brothers Luigi, Piero and Giuseppe Dell'Orto and subsequently associated with motorcycles, racing and major Italian vehicle manufacturers. His grandson Edward Coffrini Dell'Orto assumed management of the hotel in 1992 and turned his fascination with 007 into something far larger than decoration. The property became headquarters of the 007 Admiral Club in 1999, and Edward assembled one of the world's largest private Bond collections across the building. Twenty-one Bond-themed rooms were operating by September 2012, joining display cases filled with model vehicles, film objects, books, posters and spy gadgets. Edward's connection with the films crossed from collecting into production when he worked as an extra on Casino Royale at Villa del Balbianello, later collaborating with Bond actors including Ursula Andress, Caterina Murino, Maryam d'Abo and Halle Berry through festivals, premieres and other events. Daniela Bianchi and Luciana Paluzzi, who played Tatiana Romanova and Fiona Volpe, had already stayed at the hotel during its earliest period, giving Edward's later obsession an unexpected connection with his grandfather's original property. A family enterprise born from Italian carburetor engineering had, within two generations, produced a Milan hotel where motors and the Bond universe became inseparable parts of its character.
A comprehensive redesign later pushed that collecting instinct across all 60 guestrooms, assigning DUDAN DESIGN a project that converted the wider property into an art hotel organized around 60 separate themes. Cinema, motor racing, music, fashion, comics, sport and distant places became individual room subjects, with original objects and artworks extending the family's collections far beyond the earlier concentration on 007. The intervention also rebuilt the interiors and exterior envelope, introducing new windows and thermal insulation that reduced carbon emissions by 44 percent. DUDAN DESIGN's work won the 2023 Life Style Hotel award for most original project, giving the redesign formal recognition one year before Lombardy honored Admiral as an Albergo Storico di Qualità in 2024. Those honors arrived more than five decades after the hotel entered the MICHELIN Guide during its first year of activity, followed later by recognition from Gambero Rosso among Italy's leading three-star properties before its move into the four-star category. Renzo Arbore, Niki Lauda, Gianni Morandi, Mahmood, Claudio Villa, Franco Califano, Alberto Tomba, Antonio Cabrini and Eddy Merckx belong to the wider succession of entertainment and sporting figures associated with the property across those decades. DUDAN DESIGN's reinvention brought those accumulated worlds into a coherent physical program, turning five decades of family collecting, motorsport connections and celebrity encounters into the governing concept of the hotel.
How to fold Admiral Hotel into your trip.
Admiral Hotel works as the anchor for an afternoon connecting Milan's historic cycling arena, the first permanent pavilion of its great trade fair and the twenty-first-century architecture that replaced most of the old exhibition grounds.
Begin at Velodromo Vigorelli, conceived by former cyclist and sports official Giuseppe Vigorelli before Ugo Fini and Giuseppe Baselli designed the arena for the years surrounding the 1936 Olympics. A wooden track created by German specialist Clemens Schuermann for the 1932 world championships in Rome was reconstructed inside, and Giuseppe Olmo rode 45.090 kilometers there in one hour on October 31, 1935, establishing the first in a celebrated succession of cycling achievements at the venue. Continue to Palazzo dello Sport di Piazza VI Febbraio, designed by Paolo Vietti Violi and completed in less than six months for the 1923 Fiera Campionaria. Its vast column-free central hall later became a temporary home for La Scala after wartime destruction damaged the opera house, with Arturo Toscanini testing the acoustics before a 6,000-seat performance of Mefistofele began a 50-show season there in 1946; Generali acquired the surviving pavilion for €30.1 million after 52 auction raises in 2019. Finish at CityLife, where the consortium selected in the international competition brought Hadid, Isozaki and Libeskind together on the former Fiera territory, concentrating three office towers around a 178,000-square-meter public park. The progression moves from Schuermann's wooden track becoming a theater for Italian cycling through Vietti Violi's exhibition pavilion temporarily receiving La Scala to Hadid, Isozaki and Libeskind recasting the former fairgrounds around towers and public space, placing three radically different eras of Milanese ambition within the hotel's immediate surroundings.
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