In a chapel inside the Turin Cathedral a sheet, venerated by millions of Christians as the Shroud in which Jesus Christ’s body was wrapped after the Crucifixion, is kept.  
 

The print of a mangled body is still imprinted on the sheet, which is 4,36 metres long and 1,10 metres wide. The bearded face, which can be seen on the front side, is extraordinarily similar to the commonly recognised face of Christ.

The resemblance is so strong that the faithful are persuaded that it is not a simple coincidence. But is it authentic?
Sceptics have been exposing their doubts throughout the centuries, but the science of the 20^th centuries has weakened their theses despite several controversies.
Some experiments carried out by impartial scholars have been showing that the venerated sheet is really a Shroud, that is, a sheet in which a man, crucified in Palestine, was wrapped around the time when Jesus died. Maybe the fact that it really was Christ’s body could never be proved. On the Shroud the print of the body of a man aged 35-40 years and about 1,78 metres tall has remained.
The signs of a wound at his ribs is visible, as well as the traces of some wounds on his forearms, and something sharp enough to cut the flesh seems to have been wound round his head.
The greatest controversy is still about how the Shroud could have been bearing such clear prints of the body which was wrapped in it.
Other motives for a dispute come from the fact that there is no certain evidence before 1357, when the Shroud was displayed in Lirey, a French village.
At the time the Shroud belonged to a noble family, the De Charnys, who never gave an explanation of how they came into possession of it.
Among those who kept on believing in its authenticity there were the Dukes of Savoy, whom the Shroud was left in 1453.
Initially they kept it in their capital city, Chambery, where it was damaged due to a fire.
In 1758 the dukes moved their capital in Turin, where the Shroud was placed into the Cathedral, in a chapel built for that purpose.
It has remained there ever since, being venerated by many faithful, even if the Catholic Church, with its usual prudence, has never expressed an opinion about its authenticity.
In 1898 the first scientific analysis was carried out: it was nothing but a photograph taken by a certain Secondo Pia, who was astonished as he found out that the traits of the picture were highlighted on the negative.
Further analyses, carried out in 1978 thanks to highly specialized techniques, gathered an international team in Turin.
They were allowed to use any modern method but carbon-14 dating, that is, the technique able to determine the dating of objects. The ban was due to the fact that such a process destroys small parts of the examined objects, and the Church authorities obviously feared such a possibility, considering the fact that the specialists needed a large part of them because of the bad conditions of the Shroud, due to time, water and heat. A theory, which is indeed dear to sceptics, provides the following explanation: the picture on the Shroud had been simply painted around the 14th century; such an opinion has been strengthened by an American fake expert, Walter McCrone, who claimed that the blood stains have an unnatural red colour for two thousands years old blood, and that it is probably a mixture of iron oxide and tincture of madder (a pigment used by medieval artists). McCrone made a copy of the Shroud, but, differently from the original one, the colour penetrated the linen and the picture could be seen on both sides. Since 1978 more than thousand specialists have been demonstrating that the picture on the Shroud cannot be painted.
Moreover, the blood stains contain the exact percentage of calcium, proteins and iron characterizing human blood, and the analysis of all the parts of the Shroud without blood stains prove that it is a linen yellowed by time. Further analyses indicated that the linen comes from the Middle East, the only area where 33 out of the 49 species of spores found on the sheet grow. If the Shroud were a medieval fake, the faker should have got some cotton with a particular species of “Palestinian” spore on it.
The three-dimensional effect produced by the observation of the picture through a three-dimensional viewer is astonishing, no tincture can produce such an effect. Nowadays just few people keep on claiming that the Shroud is a medieval fake.

On 11 April 1997, at 11.30 pm a fire broke out inside the chapel..

Fortunately, the Shroud was saved thanks to the heroism of the Firemen and, most of all, of Mario Trematore: he threw himself into the flames when all seemed to be lost and, while all around him was crashing down, bursting and burning, began to hammer at the bullet-proof glass protecting the reliquary with a big iron cudgel and saved the Shroud before the fall of the dome could damage it

The morning after, in front of the fire-damaged Cathedral, a lot of Turin citizens were praying to thank for the rescue of the Shroud.
 

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