Mole Antonelliana

Lore & Background

The building was conceived and constructed as a synagogue. The Jewish community of Turin had enjoyed full civil rights since 1848, and at the time the construction of the synagogue began, Turin was the capital of the new Italian state, a position it held only from 1860 to 1864. The community, with a budget of 250,000 lire and the intention of having a building worthy of a capital city, hired Alessandro Antonelli. Antonelli had recently added a 121 m dome and spire to the seventeenth-century Basilica of San Gaudenzio in Novara and promised to build a synagogue for 280,000 lire.

The relationship between Antonelli and the Jewish community was not happy. He proposed a series of modifications which raised the final height to 167.5 m, over 46 m higher than the dome in the original design. Such changes, in addition to greater costs and construction time than were originally anticipated, did not please the Jewish community and construction was halted in 1869, with a provisional roof. With the transfer of the Italian capital to Florence in 1864, the community shrank, but costs and Antonelli's ambition continued to rise.

In 1876, the Jewish community, which had spent 692,000 lire for a building that was still far from finished, announced that it was withdrawing from the project. The people of Turin, who had watched the synagogue rise skyward, demanded that the city take over the project, which it did. An exchange was arranged between the Jewish community and the city of Turin for a piece of land on which a handsome Moorish Revival synagogue was quickly built. The Mole was dedicated to Victor Emmanuel II.

Antonelli resumed construction, increasing the height to 146 m, 153 m, and finally 167.5 m. He worked on the project until his death in October 1888. Antonelli's original vision for the spire was to top it off with a five-pointed star, but he later opted for a statue instead, depicting an angel, or 'genio alato'—one symbol of the House of Savoy. The statue was commissioned to the sculptor Fumagalli, months after Antonelli's death. The design included an embossed and gilded copper genie holding a lance in one hand and a palm branch in the other.

On its head was a small five-pointed star supported by a pole. When the star was set in its place on 10 April 1889, it brought the total height of the Mole to 167.5 m, making it the tallest brick building in Europe at the time.

Reader's Guide

Since 2000, the building has housed the Museo Nazionale del Cinema. The Mole appears on the reverse of the two-cent Italian euro coins and was the inspiration for the official emblem of the 2006 Winter Olympics, as well as those of the 2005 World Bocce Championships and the 2006 World Fencing Championships. The building also lent its name to one of Italian football's oldest derbies, the Derby della Mole, between Turin football clubs Torino and Juventus. On one side of the four-faced dome, the first Fibonacci numbers are written with red neon lights: they are part of the artistic work (Flight of the Numbers) by Mario Merz. In December 2017, the Mole was illuminated with over 6000 LED lights, an unprecedented event to mark 110 years since the establishment of Aem Torino, Iren, a company that supplies electricity to the city.