Why you should experience Cinema Plinius Multisala in Milan, Italy.
Cinema Plinius Multisala is a resilient neighborhood movie house where Città Studi's early-twentieth-century urban expansion meets nearly nine decades of theatrical performance, film exhibition and repeated reinvention in response to Milan's changing cinema culture.
Set along Viale Abruzzi near Via Stradella and just steps from the western edge of Città Studi, the cinema occupies a dense residential corridor between the university district and the commercial spine of Corso Buenos Aires. Its 2024 reconstruction reduced the complex to three screening rooms and introduced a substantially renewed interior after decades as a six-screen multiplex. The principal auditorium preserves the large-room experience associated with the Plinius name, with broad tiered seating focused on a screen sized for contemporary first-run releases. Two smaller auditoriums create more intimate viewing conditions, allowing simultaneous programming across films with very different audience scales. The result is a Città Studi cinema whose current three-screen form preserves the communal character of a venue that has repeatedly altered its physical structure.
What you should know about Cinema Plinius Multisala.
Cinema Plinius Multisala is best known for an entertainment history beginning in 1936, when the original Plinius opened across 1,450 square meters plus a 450-square-meter gallery with more than 2,000 seats and a stage built for variety, comedy and opera as well as film. Totò is traditionally connected with the theater through his first performance in northern Italy, placing the Plinius inside the career of one of twentieth-century Italian entertainment's central figures. The mixed theatrical and cinematic period ended after 1948 as the operation concentrated on second- and third-run film exhibition; a major 1967 reconstruction subsequently removed dressing rooms and part of the stage and established cinema as its sole purpose. Another decisive transformation began with closure in 1996 and culminated in 1997, when 3,700 square meters across ground, first and basement levels emerged as five first-run auditoriums holding 260, 140, 260, 440 and 260 seats. A sixth auditorium followed in 2006 with 74 seats, completing the configuration that defined Plinius for the next eighteen years. The pandemic-era pressure on theatrical exhibition preceded another major intervention in 2024: the cinema closed at the end of March, part of the property was converted for an Aldi supermarket and Plinius reopened with three fully reconstructed auditoriums. That contraction preserved film exhibition inside a building that has passed from 2,000-seat theater to dedicated cinema, five-screen multiplex, six-screen complex and three-screen contemporary operation across nine decades.
The current screening configuration concentrates film presentation into three auditoriums distributed through the building, with the largest room retaining the scale required for major first-run releases and smaller rooms supporting concurrent programming. Wider contemporary seating introduced during the 2024 work increases separation between spectators and changes the physical rhythm of the auditoriums from the denser arrangements of the earlier multiplex. Digital projection supports the regular release schedule alongside three-dimensional presentations, giving mainstream theatrical distribution its principal technical format. Original-language screenings add another mode of exhibition, placing subtitled international releases beside Italian-language programming across the weekly schedule. Special presentations and festival-derived titles periodically interrupt the standard commercial cycle, continuing the cinema's role as a neighborhood screen with access to films circulating beyond ordinary release patterns. Large auditorium scale, smaller screening rooms, digital presentation and diversified programming give the reconstructed Plinius several distinct viewing conditions inside the reduced footprint.
How to fold Cinema Plinius Multisala into your trip.
Cinema Plinius Multisala works as the evening endpoint for an architectural route through the western edge of Città Studi and nearby Buenos Aires, where interwar residential design, private collecting and experimental modernism developed within Milan's rapidly expanding twentieth-century neighborhoods.
Begin at Casa Corbellini-Wassermann, designed by Piero Portaluppi between 1934 and 1936 for a bourgeois residential commission on Viale Lombardia, when this edge of Città Studi remained near Milan's expanding urban boundary. Portaluppi clad the exterior in gray and pink Ornavasso marble and filled the principal apartment with green Alpi Cesana, Issorie and Roja stone, Carrara marble and red Levanto and Amiata varieties; a helical marble staircase reused an element from the Casa del Sabato degli Sposi that Portaluppi and BBPR had created for the 1933 Triennale. Continue to Casa Museo Boschi Di Stefano, housed inside another Portaluppi building constructed between 1929 and 1931 by the Radici-Di Stefano company for Francesco Di Stefano's family. His daughter Marieda and her husband Antonio Boschi assembled more than 2,000 twentieth-century works, later donated to Milan, with 300 pieces now spanning Novecento Italiano, Mario Sironi, Corrente, Giorgio Morandi, Filippo de Pisis, Lucio Fontana, Spazialismo and Informale inside the apartment where the collection developed. Conclude at Piscina Cozzi, designed by Luigi Lorenzo Secchi between 1933 and 1935 as one of Europe's pioneering covered Olympic pools and the first fully indoor public swimming complex of its kind in Italy. Secchi organized the symmetrical brick-and-light-marble building around a vast covered basin, creating an interwar public architecture project whose scale placed Milan alongside contemporary swimming facilities in Berlin and Budapest. The progression moves from Portaluppi's experiments with stone, domestic planning and Triennale design through the Boschi-Di Stefano transformation of a private apartment into a concentrated twentieth-century art collection and Secchi's engineering of indoor public sport, tracing the architectural ambitions that reshaped the districts surrounding Plinius during the same decades in which the cinema emerged.
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