Category: Personal

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).

The temple of Saint Michael the Archangel sits on a hill about 20 minutes outside the gates of the old city of Perugia in Italy, and was built sometime in the 5th century. It was originally a pagan temple, and at some point became a Christian church. It is open to the public and has a unique wooden circular dome, and inside there are alcoves distributed around the circular walls for christenings, etc.

This is one of the venues at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, which I’ve been to a number of times . It’s the former San Francesco al Prato church or the Church of Saint Francis in the Meadow, and it was derelict and half destroyed for decades — due to landslides, earthquakes, floods and general neglect — before being renovated and turned into a conference venue. The original building dates back to the 1200s sometime, but in the 1800s they tried to renovate it and wound up almost destroying it. It was reconstructed in its current state in the 2000s.