Note 200 — CHAPTER 8 SECOND EMPIRE PARIS, UNITED ITALY, AND IMPERIAL-AND-ROYAL VIENNA

The most conspicuous exception, dominating the whole city, is the Mole Antonelliana. This extraordinary edifice, begun by Alessandro Antonelli (1798-1880) in 1863, more than rivals his very tall earlier dome on San Gaudenzio in Novara, designed in 1840. Never really completed, the construction of the Mole continued intermittently down to Antonelli’s death. By its great height and in some of the technicalities of its construction it rivals the Eiffel Tower and the early American skyscrapers which are posterior to it by several decades. Yet Antonelli arrived at no coherent expression of his structural innovations and, to judge from the successive purposes for which the structure has been intended to serve or has served, no real capacity to provide a functionally viable building. On the whole, as its present name implies, this is a monument chiefly to its designer’s megalomania.