Mole Antonelliana

Brief information

The Mole Antonelliana began as a synagogue with a school, but grew into a 167-meter tower that Turin came to see as its architectural symbol. The original design was almost four times lower: 47 meters. Then Antonelli changed the concept again and again, and an ordinary religious building turned into a vertical experiment of stone, colonnades, and a spire.

This change in scale explains the strangeness of the structure: it looks not like a unified temple, but like a building that was constantly being pulled upward. The Jewish community refused to continue financing the expensive project, the city completed it, later the Museum of the Risorgimento was housed inside, and since 2000 the National Museum of Cinema has operated there. Its purpose changed, but the main fact remained the form itself: the building reads as a fixed history of growth.

What to notice right away

It makes sense to compare the lower square logic of the building with the upper tiers. The “tempietto” stands on a square base and is arranged as a two-story neoclassical colonnade of six columns; it repeats the ceremonial entrance motif at the base. Higher up, Antonelli moves away from the square: a smaller circular colonnade appears, the “lantern,” set on a truncated cone. This makes it clear how the building stops being simply a volume and turns into an elongated tower structure.

The spire is also important not only because of its height. In the design it was octagonal, with ten circular terraces that became smaller toward the top. At the summit there first stood a gilded copper figure of a “winged genius,” but residents took it for an angel. After the tornado of 1953, which tore away 47 meters of the spire, the damaged statue was removed and replaced with a star. This top section shows that the current silhouette is not entirely original, but restored after an abrupt rupture.