The slender brick spire of the Mole is Turin's unmissable landmark, visible from almost any street in the centre and emblazoned on the back of the two-cent euro coin. Begun as a synagogue and finished, decades late, as a monument to national unity, it is now the home of the National Cinema Museum.
The museum is the real reason to come. Italy's only museum dedicated to film occupies a vertiginous central hall lined with reclining red sofas, with galleries spiralling upwards through pop-up exhibits on horror, fantasy, animation and a hundred years of Italian cinema. A glass-walled lift then runs up the centre of the dome to a panoramic terrace at 85 metres, with the Alps spread out across the horizon on a clear day.