//
Photo: Gunnar Klack, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
The Mole, Turin's landmark building built in 1888, was intended as a synagogue but the size and cost got out of hand and the Jewish community never used it. The 167.5-metre tower is the highest work of masonry in Europe and you can ride a lift to the cupola at the top. Within it, the National Cinema Museum is a vast exhibition space spiralling up five floors. The themes of the floors are the archaeology of cinema, the video camera, a collection of cinema posters, video installations (with side rooms screening clips), and the Great Temple where you recline in comfy red chairs and watch — or is it worship? — Italian film classics projected on giant screens overhead. Artefacts include magic lanterns, optical illusions, photographs, drawings, models, props and costumes, such as the original cape worn by Christopher Reeve in Superman in 1978.
The Mole Antonelliana is a major landmark building in Turin, Italy, named after its architect, Alessandro Antonelli. A mole in Italian is a building of monumental proportions.
© OpenStreetMap contributors
Decorative Arts Museum
Extensive display of furniture, painting and other decorative art.
The Palace was built in the 16th century, modernised in the 17th and converted to a museum in 1946. The result is a wacky hybrid of medieval, baroque and bling. You enter via the palace gardens to reach the ticket office. The ticket covers five attractions:
- Galleria Sabauda houses the vast art collection of the rulers of Savoy.
- Chapel of the Shroud is accessed this way, and from a gallery looks into the Cathedral.
- Royal Apartments: gilt, red flock, chandeliers, vast paintings, and everything else to impress.
- Royal Armoury: dating from the 16th century, the 1833 collection of Sardinian king Carlo Alberto.
- Royal Library: this contains some 200,000 print volumes, 4500 manuscripts, 3055 drawings, 187 incunabula predating 1501, 5019 16th-century books, 20,987 pamphlets, 1500 works on parchment, 1112 periodicals, and 400 photo albums, maps, engravings, and prints. It contains several works Leonardo da Vinci's: Codex on the Flight of Birds, his self-portrait, his study for the angel in his Virgin of the Rocks and his study for the angel in Verrocchio's The Baptism of Christ.
Impressive quality photography, with 3 or 4 exhibitions a year.
Museo Nazionale del Risorgimento Italiano
Fascinating exposition of the tumultuous birth of modern Italy, set in the very building where many events took place: Carlo Alberto and Vittorio Emanuele II were born here, and the first Italian parliament sat here. Garibaldi's campaign was in the context of revolutions and upheavals all over Europe, the greatest of all being the Industrial Revolution. It was a very literary and graphic age, so events are vividly shown in film, photos, political cartoons and other artefacts.
The city's oldest and premier theatre, opened in 1753. It was wrecked by fire in 1786 but swiftly rebuilt to the original plan, and from 1936 to 1973 it was the opera house during Teatro Regio's lengthy closure.
Trad natural history display of rocks and stuffed animals in a former hospital.