Mole Antonelliana

Turin's skyline is ruled by a dome that keeps going upward: a square cupola that narrows into a colonnaded lantern and then into a slender spire, 167.5 metres in all. The Mole Antonelliana takes its name from its architect, Alessandro Antonelli, and from the Italian word mole, a building of monumental size. Turin itself, the first capital of united Italy and the seat of the House of Savoy, is a city of arcaded streets and Baroque squares on the Po, and the Mole rises a few blocks from its centre.

The building began as a synagogue. Turin's Jewish community, given full civil rights in 1848, commissioned Antonelli in 1863 to build a temple worthy of the new national capital. Antonelli, who had already crowned the basilica of San Gaudenzio in Novara with a soaring dome and spire, kept revising his design upwards, and the costs and delays grew with it. Work stopped in 1869 under a temporary roof, and in 1876 the community withdrew. The city took the building over, giving the community land elsewhere for a new synagogue, and dedicated the Mole to King Victor Emmanuel II. Antonelli went on raising it, adding a neoclassical columned temple, the Tempietto, then a granite lantern and the spire, and supervised the work until his death in 1888, at about ninety. The spire was completed in 1889, when the building became the tallest masonry structure of its time in Europe.

Storms have struck the top more than once. In 1904 the gilded winged genius that crowned the spire was blown down, and in 1953 a violent squall brought down the upper 47 metres; the spire was rebuilt with a steel frame faced in stone. Since 2000 the Mole has housed Italy's National Museum of Cinema, which makes it one of the tallest museums anywhere. A glass-walled lift rises through the vast central hall to the panoramic terrace of the Tempietto at 85 metres, with views across the whole city. The Mole appears on Italy's two-cent euro coin, gave its name to the Derby della Mole between Torino and Juventus, and was admired by Nietzsche during his time in Turin.

Getting there

The Mole Antonelliana stands in the centre of Turin, about 0.5 km from the heart of the city, close to Via Po. Turin Airport (TRN) at Caselle is about 15 km to the north. The city's main railway stations are Torino Porta Nuova and Torino Porta Susa.