The Cathedral of St John the Baptist (Cattedrale di San Giovanni Battista, Duomo di Torino) is worth visiting for the sake of an object that’s hardly ever seen – the Holy Shroud (Sacra Sindone).

The church interior is not particularly ornate.  The nave is plain, with Doric piers supporting round arches, the bulk of it built very quickly between 1491 and 1498 alongside a slightly older brick bell tower.  There is, however, a sequence of spectacularly Baroque side chapels, a huge organ case aloft in a transept, and a shrine to the twentieth-century Catholic local hero Pier Giorgio Frassati (1901-1925), due to be canonised in the centenary of his death from polio.

The elaborately Baroque Chapel of the Holy Shroud (1668-94) fills the space between the east end of the Cathedral and the adjacent Royal Palace. 

The story of the revered relic it was built to contain is unrecorded before 1354, when it was exhibited in the French town of Lirey about a hundred miles east of Paris.

It came into the possession of the Royal House of Savoy in 1453,  and was kept in the royal chapel at the Savoyard capital, Chambéry.  There it sustained fire-damage in 1532, and it was transferred to the new capital of Savoy, Turin, in 1578.

Charles Emmanuel II, Duke of Savoy (1634-1675) commissioned priest, engineer and mathematician Camillo Guarino Guarini (1624-1683), to complete the elaborate chapel that had been planned by his predecessor, Charles Emmanuel I “the Great”, Duke of Savoy (1562-1630). 

The floor of the Shroud Chapel is raised so that the interior Is visible from the nave, and both public pilgrims and royal visitors could gain access to the chapel on separate occasions.  Crowned by Guarini’s dome, a masterpiece of engineering, the Chapel was consecrated by the architect in 1680, but was only completed after his death.  It was finally ready to receive the Shroud in 1694.

At the time of the 1898 exposition of the Shroud it was photographed for the first time by an amateur photographer, Secondo Pia (1855-1941), who was astonished that the negative image provided detail invisible to the naked eye.

Following a fire in 1997, the Shroud is currently stored in a temperature- and humidity-controlled case in a side-chapel. 

Since 1998, the 500th anniversary of the Cathedral’s consecration, the Shroud has been shown much more frequently than before, in 2000, 2010, 2015 and (by live stream because of Covid) at Easter 2020.

At all other times visitors are invited to sit in front of a digital image of Christ’s face, an opportunity that is treated with the greatest respect.  Even the bambini fall quiet.

I respect the views of scientists who say the Shroud’s herringbone weave postdates the time of Christ, that the images are painted with identifiable colour agents such as iron oxide, and so on, but I also sense that we can’t possibly know the significance of this piece of fabric. 

There’s an ethereal quality about the image that defies logic, and hosts of visitors to Turin gaze with awe at what may be the face of their Redeemer.