Alessandro Antonelli began the Mole in 1863 as a synagogue for Turin's Jewish community, then kept revising the design upward until the rising cost forced the city to take it over in 1877 and finish it as a civic monument instead.
At 167 meters it was, briefly, the tallest masonry building in the world. Since 2000 its cavernous interior has held the National Museum of Cinema, its galleries spiraling around a central void hung with props, posters, and early optical devices. A glass elevator crosses that void in under a minute, opening onto a balcony 85 meters up where Turin's grid of streets gives way, on a clear day, to a full ring of the Alps.
