Why you should experience Sala Admiral PlayCity in Milan, Italy.
Sala Admiral PlayCity is a large-scale entertainment center where Bicocca's postindustrial reinvention, Pirelli RE's 2005 leisure complex, Allstar's national PlayCity operation and a 2026 arcade-technology overhaul converge through bowling, virtual reality and more than one hundred arcade games.
Set along Viale Sarca near Via Chiese and just steps from Pirelli HangarBicocca, the entertainment center occupies Bicocca Village, the leisure complex inaugurated in 2005 as former industrial territory across northern Milan entered a new phase centered on culture, university life and recreation. Bowling lanes share the venue with pool tables, arcade machines and virtual-reality attractions, creating several distinct forms of play inside the same large indoor operation. A major 2026 technology upgrade placed more than one hundred arcade machines onto a unified Semnox platform, introducing RFID Play Cards, cash operation and self-service kiosks across the arcade floor. The result is a Bicocca entertainment center where bowling and traditional coin-operated amusements now sit beside virtual reality and networked arcade technology inside a complex born from the district's vast industrial redevelopment.
What you should know about Sala Admiral PlayCity.
Sala Admiral PlayCity is best known for combining more than one hundred arcade games with bowling, pool and virtual reality inside the PlayCity network operated by Allstar, a company whose development became closely tied to NOVOMATIC Italia through a long sequence of acquisitions and consolidations. NOVOMATIC entered Italy in 2007 through Adria Gaming International and acquired a majority interest in AllStar Italiana the following year. Another major step arrived in 2017 when the group acquired 80 percent of FEC S.p.A., then operator of six Italian gaming halls containing 245 AWP machines and 258 VLT terminals. NOVOMATIC completed its acquisition of FEC in 2019. That year also brought a larger retail reorganization, with ADMIRAL Games, ADMIRAL Entertainment and Casinò delle Alpi incorporated into Allstar. FEC followed into Allstar in 2020 alongside Bingoland and Novarmatic, concentrating several entertainment operations under one company. PlayCity now operates as Allstar's family-entertainment brand across more than a dozen Italian centers, with locations stretching from Milan and Lissone to Florence, Rome, Moncalieri and Sardinia. Milan's Bicocca venue entered another phase in January 2026 through the installation of Semnox Solutions' venue-management technology. More than one hundred arcade games received Semnox Lumin readers. Three self-service kiosks with integrated payment processing joined the floor, and full Italian-language support was incorporated across the system. The installation was only Allstar's second Semnox-powered center, positioning Bicocca near the beginning of a wider technological program scheduled to reach further PlayCity projects during 2026.
The arcade floor now operates through a dual-payment structure built around RFID Play Cards and traditional cash, allowing the same collection of machines to function through two transaction routes. Semnox Lumin readers connect more than one hundred individual games to that system, placing a small digital interface directly at each participating machine. Three self-service kiosks handle card transactions and payment processing away from the principal counter. Ticket-based Play & Win machines add a redemption mechanism, with accumulated tickets exchanged for prizes displayed in dedicated cases. Bowling changes the physical scale through full lanes, rental shoes and computerized scoring, including player photographs incorporated into animated graphics between turns. Pool tables provide a slower competitive format away from the arcade cabinets. Virtual-reality attractions introduce head-mounted digital play, extending the venue beyond screen-and-control arcade formats. PlayCity's broader activity mix also includes table tennis, table football and darts at selected centers, with Bicocca operating as one of the network's principal Milan locations. The combination gives Sala Admiral PlayCity several distinct modes of recreation under one roof, moving from short arcade sessions through ticket collection to longer bowling, pool and virtual-reality play.
How to fold Sala Admiral PlayCity into your trip.
Sala Admiral PlayCity works as the recreation anchor for an afternoon tracing Renaissance Bicocca, Milan's heavy-industrial expansion and the cultural institutions created from the district's immense twentieth-century factories.
Begin at Bicocca degli Arcimboldi, the fifteenth-century country residence whose name eventually passed to the entire district. The Arcimboldi family built the villa outside Milan as a rural retreat, arranging two floors beneath an upper loggia and a colonnaded ground-floor portico across a building forty meters long. Pirelli acquired the property in 1918 after establishing its industrial presence nearby, and the company later restored the residence and retained it as an official reception site. Continue to Pirelli HangarBicocca, whose buildings preserve the industrial world that subsequently surrounded the Arcimboldi villa. Ernesto Breda transferred his company into Bicocca from 1903, developing a 200,000-square-meter factory producing railway carriages, locomotives, boilers and agricultural machinery. The present Shed was already operating during the 1920s, the Cubo arrived in 1955, and the immense 9,500-square-meter Navate followed between 1963 and 1965 for assembling and testing high-powered transformers. Prelios converted the abandoned industrial complex into an art center in 2004, when Anselm Kiefer created The Seven Heavenly Palaces as a permanent installation of concrete towers inside the former factory. Conclude at Teatro degli Arcimboldi, developed during the Bicocca redevelopment to provide Milan with a major performance venue during Teatro alla Scala's restoration. Vittorio Gregotti designed the theater with Mario Botta and Elisabetta Fabbri as part of the district's architectural transformation, and it opened in January 2002 with Verdi's La traviata. La Scala used the building through 2004 before returning to its historic theater, leaving the Arcimboldi to develop an independent program of opera, concerts, musicals and large theatrical productions. The progression moves from the Arcimboldi family's Renaissance retreat through Breda's vast industrial works into Kiefer's converted factory and Gregotti's new theater, tracing the sequence that turned Bicocca from countryside into an industrial center and then a major cultural district around Sala Admiral PlayCity.
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