The Mole (mo-lay in Italian) is an iconic building in Turin, mostly because the rest of the city has a height limit that makes the Mole stick out even more than it would otherwise. It is the tallest unreinforced building in the world — meaning it has no skeleton of metal girders, as most tall modern buildings do. It was originally built as a synagogue, and the spire is quite spectacular close up. It is now the museum of the motion picture, which commemorates the fact that the Lumiere brothers developed the first moving pictures in Turin in the 1800s, despite being French by birth (Turin has historically had a very French flavour).
