🎬 A Team Wiped Out on the Hill, a Synagogue That Became a Cinema

The marker on Superga's apse commemorates one of the worst disasters in football history. On 4 May 1949, the plane carrying Torino FC home from a friendly match in Lisbon flew into thick fog and struck the basilica's retaining wall, killing all 31 people aboard — the entire starting lineup of Grande Torino, widely considered the strongest club side Italy had ever produced, on the brink of a fifth straight league title. Rival teams insisted Torino be awarded the championship anyway, and half a million people lined the streets of the city for the funeral.

The Mole Antonelliana was never supposed to be a symbol of cinema — it was commissioned in 1863 by Turin's Jewish community as a synagogue, funded to celebrate their newly won civil rights. The architect kept revising the design upward, pushing the height far past the original plan and the budget along with it. By 1876 the congregation had already spent nearly 700,000 lire on an unfinished shell and gave up on the project entirely, handing it to the city. It was completed as a secular monument in 1889 — the tallest structure in Turin, having started life as a house of worship that never held a single service.