Description
The Museum of the Shroud tells the story of the most debated cloth in Christendom, even though the cloth is not here: it is kept in the Cathedral. It is in Turin, in the crypt of the Church of the Holy Shroud, and gathers artifacts, documents, images and scientific studies on the Shroud.
It is a museum for anyone who wants to understand what people mean when they talk about the Shroud, without having to take sides: the history, the public exhibitions, the research. The cloth displayed in its case is another matter, but here you find everything around it.
The route follows the story from the second half of the 1400s, when the cloth became the property of the Savoys. Documents, books, prints and paintings illustrate the great public expositions, when the cloth was shown to the crowd.
Among the most significant objects is the silver casket that held the Shroud from the late 1500s to 1998, and the one used to carry the cloth to Turin in 1578.
Then comes science. The investigations began with the first photographs of the Shroud, and the museum follows them up to the most recent results. A hologram shows the three-dimensional structure of the image, discovered in 1978 by Jackson and Jumper and independently confirmed by Giovanni Tamburelli of Turin.
After the museum you can also visit the Church of the Holy Shroud, built between 1734 and 1764 by the same confraternity, with a singular set of works devoted to the cloth.
The museum was born in 1936 on the initiative of the Confraternity of the Holy Shroud, the same one that in the 1700s had built the church above its rooms. In 1998 it moved to its present home.
The Shroud arrived in Turin in 1578, brought from Chambéry by Duke Emmanuel Philibert, who had recently moved the capital here. Since then it has always stayed in the city. In 1532 it had narrowly escaped a fire in Chambéry, which left the marks of burns.
In 1988 a carbon-14 test, carried out by three laboratories (Oxford, Tucson and Zurich), dated the linen between 1260 and 1390, but supporters of its authenticity dispute that result. The question remains open, and it is the reason the Shroud is still being studied.
Don't miss
• The silver casket.
• The casket from the 1578 journey.
• The hologram.
• The Church of the Holy Shroud.
Did you know?
• In 1983 the last king of Italy, Umberto II, left the Shroud to the Pope in his will, who decided it would stay in Turin.
• The first to photograph it was Secondo Pia, in 1898: on the negative the image appeared "as a positive."
It is a museum for anyone who wants to understand what people mean when they talk about the Shroud, without having to take sides: the history, the public exhibitions, the research. The cloth displayed in its case is another matter, but here you find everything around it.
The route follows the story from the second half of the 1400s, when the cloth became the property of the Savoys. Documents, books, prints and paintings illustrate the great public expositions, when the cloth was shown to the crowd.
Among the most significant objects is the silver casket that held the Shroud from the late 1500s to 1998, and the one used to carry the cloth to Turin in 1578.
Then comes science. The investigations began with the first photographs of the Shroud, and the museum follows them up to the most recent results. A hologram shows the three-dimensional structure of the image, discovered in 1978 by Jackson and Jumper and independently confirmed by Giovanni Tamburelli of Turin.
After the museum you can also visit the Church of the Holy Shroud, built between 1734 and 1764 by the same confraternity, with a singular set of works devoted to the cloth.
The museum was born in 1936 on the initiative of the Confraternity of the Holy Shroud, the same one that in the 1700s had built the church above its rooms. In 1998 it moved to its present home.
The Shroud arrived in Turin in 1578, brought from Chambéry by Duke Emmanuel Philibert, who had recently moved the capital here. Since then it has always stayed in the city. In 1532 it had narrowly escaped a fire in Chambéry, which left the marks of burns.
In 1988 a carbon-14 test, carried out by three laboratories (Oxford, Tucson and Zurich), dated the linen between 1260 and 1390, but supporters of its authenticity dispute that result. The question remains open, and it is the reason the Shroud is still being studied.
Don't miss
• The silver casket.
• The casket from the 1578 journey.
• The hologram.
• The Church of the Holy Shroud.
Did you know?
• In 1983 the last king of Italy, Umberto II, left the Shroud to the Pope in his will, who decided it would stay in Turin.
• The first to photograph it was Secondo Pia, in 1898: on the negative the image appeared "as a positive."