Michele Beltramone, the self-taught Italian artisan celebrated nationwide for dreaming up and building the extraordinary "Rotating House" (Casa che gira), has passed away at age 91 in Barge, a town in the Piedmont region’s Cuneo province. Though he was neither an engineer nor an architect - having worked as a plumber with only an elementary school education - Beltramone’s mushroom-shaped home, erected forty years ago, remains an absolute architectural one-off. He drew inspiration for the unique shape from a local surveyor friend, while the rotation mechanism was inspired by watching a traditional circular ballroom dance floor.

Standing about 26 feet high and 52 feet wide, the structure rests on a sophisticated bearing pad composed of 98 steel spheres. A small two-horsepower electric motor allows the building to complete a full rotation in either 56 minutes or 24 hours, depending on how much sunlight the owner wanted to catch. Thanks to this ingenious, whimsical feature, Beltramone became a local legend, frequently featured in newspapers and television specials. When asked in the past why he built such an eccentric home, he simply replied, "That way, my house is always kissed by the sun."