Torre Littoria, Turin
Turin, Italy
Exterior only
Visible from the street; the inside is private.
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Turin's Torre Littoria, designed by Armando Melis de Villa and completed in 1934, stands as the city's pioneering high-rise and a landmark of Italian rationalist architecture. Originally conceived as a Fascist tower intended to house the National Fascist Party headquarters—a role it never fulfilled—the building was instead acquired by Reale Mutua Assicurazioni, the insurance company that financed most of its construction and remains its owner. Facing the Royal Palace across Piazza Castello, the structure combines a nine-story low-rise section with a 19-story tower reaching 87 meters, crowned by an antenna that brings its total height to 109 meters, making it Italy's tallest continuously habitable building until 1940. A pioneering work of early modernism, it introduced innovations including glass brick, clinker brick, and linoleum, and was the first Italian building with a welded metal structural frame. The tower's assertive proximity to the royal palace sparked controversy, earning epithets ranging from "eyesore" to "the finger of Duce," and during World War II its roof housed one of Turin's air raid sirens, sustaining minor damage in the 1943 bombing.
Architect
Movement
- Built
- Type
- multifamily residential
- Place
- Turin, Italy
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Location