125 Turin, Italy, Cathedral of John the Baptist. Proud of the shroud

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Now I visit considerably more churches than I find time to post about, and there is a backlog here on my desktop computer of over a hundred set of photos. Churches get to jump the queue if they are in the Paris region (gotta justify the name of the blog), or if they are cathedrals. So here is Turin cathedral. Of course it is famous for having (in a pretty box  behind bars) the shroud, which the pope declared, in the sixteenth century, to be the true shroud Jesus was buried in, imprinted miraculously with a front and back image of his body. Scientists allowed to examine the shroud do not really agree on this, and it is probs a fourteenth century fake. Ownership of the shroud passed from the House of Savoy to the Catholic Church after the death of former king Umberto II in 1983, in case you missed that. 

The church was built in the 15th century and is dedicated to John the Baptist. It has a lovely tourist logo, the nicest confessional I have seen for ages, and a series of fine paintings of holy episodes. Also relics, lecterns, and a beautiful bishop’s chair (that is, the beautiful chair of a bishop).

 
































 

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