Why you should experience Multisala Colosseo in Milan, Italy.
Multisala Colosseo is a storied movie palace where Porta Vittoria's twentieth-century expansion, Alessandro Rimini's theatrical architecture, the Quilleri family's four-generation exhibition lineage and nearly a century of cinematic reinvention survive behind one of Milan's most distinctive cinema facades.
Set along Viale Monte Nero near Via Spartaco and just steps from Piazza Cinque Giornate, the historic cinema occupies Porta Vittoria's eastern approach to Central Milan, where residential blocks, neighborhood commerce and cultural venues spread outward from the former Spanish walls during the early twentieth century. Classical masks, sculptural ornament and the great entrance arch still announce the building with the theatrical scale Rimini gave his original 1920s composition, even after decades of internal reconstruction. The auditorium that once accommodated close to 2,000 spectators has given way to multiple screens, yet the surviving exterior keeps the contemporary cinema physically connected to Milan's era of immense purpose-built picture palaces. The result is a rare continuity between interwar architectural ambition and present-day moviegoing, sustained through wartime damage, the Quilleri family's intervention and repeated reconstruction inside the same Viale Monte Nero building.
What you should know about Multisala Colosseo.
Multisala Colosseo is best known for beginning as one of architect Alessandro Rimini's first major Milanese commissions before becoming a cornerstone of the Quilleri family's century-long career in theatrical exhibition. Born in Palermo in 1898 to a Jewish family of Venetian origin, Rimini fought during the First World War, was captured after Caporetto in 1917 and sent to the coal mines of Munster in Westphalia, where drawing portraits for fellow prisoners helped him obtain food. He escaped on foot toward the Netherlands, returned to Italy after the war and graduated in architectural drawing from Venice's Accademia di Belle Arti in 1921, where he met sculptor Franco Asco, whose work later entered several Rimini buildings. Restoration work for the Trieste heritage authorities preceded his 1924 move to Milan with his future wife Olga Benini, and the young architect soon received the Colosseo commission for a cinema incorporated into a larger building containing homes and commercial premises. Rimini designed and supervised construction between 1926 and 1927, creating an auditorium of 1,800 seats with a horseshoe balcony suspended without supporting columns, enormous ventilation equipment and decoration drawing on Roman imagery. The cinema opened on April 8, 1927, launching Rimini into a Milanese career that later produced additional theaters and the 1935-1937 Torre Snia Viscosa, the city's first skyscraper. Fascist racial laws barred him from professional practice in 1938, forcing him to work without signing projects, and his connection to the Colosseo became brutally personal when he was arrested there during the German occupation. Rimini escaped during transport, reached his property near Mantua on foot, returned to Milan by bicycle and survived the remaining war years under the false name Guido Lara, posing as a painter. Four decades later, David Quilleri acquired management of the Colosseo in 1985, bringing the theater into a family profession begun by his grandfather Amilcare, who styled himself a cinema pioneer, and continued by David's father William. David persuaded the property owners to divide the immense auditorium, and the Colosseo reopened as a three-screen cinema on December 5, 1988 before later expansion increased its number of auditoriums. His sons Tomaso, Jacopo and Lorenzo subsequently joined the enterprise, with Tomaso representing the fourth Quilleri generation and serving as ANEC Lombardia president and ANEC national vice president. A renovation exceeding €2 million in 2024 renewed the cinema under Tomaso and his brothers, completing a chain from Rimini's 1927 picture palace through David Quilleri's multisala conversion to a fourth generation still operating the building almost a century after its inauguration.
The current Colosseo spreads its program across auditoriums of sharply different scales, allowing blockbuster releases, auteur films, previews and special events to coexist within a single historic building. Its principal rooms retain the dimensions needed for major releases, with smaller auditoriums supporting films aimed at narrower audiences. The 2024 reconstruction reduced total seating from 900 to about 800 as larger armchairs and paired seats increased the physical space assigned to individual spectators. Projection and acoustic improvements accompanied that work, extending the Quilleri strategy of making the theatrical presentation itself a reason to leave home for a film. Pedro Almodóvar's The Room Next Door, winner of the Golden Lion at the 81st Venice International Film Festival, marked the renewed Colosseo's return in September 2024. The film connected the reopening directly with the international festival circuit at the same moment the building approached its centenary. That combination of large releases, filmmaker-driven programming and substantially renewed auditoriums preserves the Colosseo as an active cinema first, even as Rimini's surviving facade carries its much longer architectural history.
How to fold Multisala Colosseo into your trip.
Multisala Colosseo works as the cultural stop for a Porta Vittoria route connecting Giuseppe Grandi's sculptural interpretation of Milan's 1848 uprising, Francesco Croce's eighteenth-century funerary complex for the Ospedale Maggiore and Alberto Migliorini's surviving pavilion from the city's former fruit and vegetable market.
Begin at Cinque Giornate, where Giuseppe Grandi transformed the Milanese uprising of March 18 to 22, 1848 into a sculptural ensemble on the site associated with Porta Tosa, whose capture helped force Joseph Radetzky's Austrian forces from the city. Grandi won the competition in 1881 and spent more than a decade developing the monument before his death shortly before its March 18, 1895 inauguration, with the remains of fallen audaciouss placed beneath the composition. Continue to Rotonda della Besana, begun in 1695 as the new burial complex for the Ospedale Maggiore after its earlier cemetery became inadequate. Attilio Arrigoni directed the initial works, Francesco Croce developed the church of San Michele and surrounding portico from 1719, and silk merchant Giambattista Annone helped finance completion of the enclosure in 1731. Conclude at Palazzina Liberty Dario Fo e Franca Rame, designed by Alberto Migliorini in 1908 for Milan's new Verziere fruit and vegetable market and spared when the surrounding market structures disappeared in 1965. Dario Fo and Franca Rame's La Comune occupied the pavilion from 1974, converting a former mercantile gathering place into an experimental theatrical base before the building later took their names. The progression moves from Grandi's grand treatment of Milanese revolt through Croce and Arrigoni's architecture for the Ospedale Maggiore into Migliorini, Fo and Rame's successive reinventions of a market pavilion, tracing civic memory, architecture and performance across the eastern districts surrounding the Colosseo.
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