Tempio Israelitico di Torino

A square brick mass crowned by tall towers and domes, the Great Synagogue of Turin was raised in 1884 as a celebration of Jewish emancipation. Behind its Moorish-revival decoration a congregation still worships; the building belongs to the Jewish Community of Turin and remains first of all a house of prayer.

Why it matters

The Tempio Israelitico is both the monumental synagogue of Turin's Jewish Community and a chapter of the city's architectural history with an unexpected twist. Its story begins with the failed design for a different building: after the ghetto was abolished and full legal rights granted to Piedmont's Jews in 1848, the community resolved to build a synagogue worthy of its new citizenship, and the commission went to Alessandro Antonelli, the engineer whose escalating ambitions produced the Mole Antonelliana nearby. The community, financially overwhelmed by Antonelli's soaring plans, sold the unfinished structure to the City in 1878; it was completed as the Mole, which became Turin's symbol. With the proceeds the community bought a new plot in the city's expanding quarter beyond Porta Nuova, and there, in 1884, the present synagogue rose — eclectic in style with the Moorish predominance prescribed in its competition brief, a fashionable language for new synagogues across late nineteenth-century Europe. It remains an active house of prayer under the care of Turin's Jewish Community.

What to notice

• The exterior massing: a compact basilican block with four corner towers and domed roofs, brick-built, consciously different from the church architecture of the surrounding streets.
• The interior plan of three aisles, which reflects how much the building's era assimilated the spatial model of the local Christian basilicas — a deliberate statement of belonging.
• The original interior decoration was destroyed in bombing in 1942; the interior was subsequently restored.
• The liturgical reordering of 1986–87, when a new tevà (reading platform) was placed at the centre of the hall and the seating turned towards it, in keeping with the local Piedmontese tradition.
• The Tempio Piccolo in the basement, in use since 1970 for daily worship, whose baroque Piedmontese furnishings came from the synagogue of Chieri, moved to Turin after the war; the surrounding gallery presents ceremonial art from communities across the region.

Context and history

A Jewish presence is attested in Turin from 1424, and the community's life was long governed by the "Statuta Sabaudiae" of Duke Amadeus VIII. In 1679 the city established a ghetto — the first and, until 1723, the only one in Piedmont. Emancipation came with the statutes that followed the Albertine Statute of 1848, granting Jewish citizens full rights; in the enthusiasm of that new freedom the community launched its synagogue as a monument to integration and civic presence. Antonelli's grandiose project began in 1863, but escalating height and costs forced a halt from 1869; in 1878 the municipality bought the site, and the building was completed as the Mole Antonelliana. The new synagogue, concluded in 1884 on a design by Enrico Petiti, expressed itself in the Moorish style required by the original announcement. The twentieth century scarred the building — the decorative interior perished in the 1942 bombing — but the congregation restored and reordered it, most recently with the 1986–87 liturgical rearrangement, and it continues to serve the community that has lived in Turin without interruption for six centuries.