he shroud is a linen sheet, 4.36 metres long by 1.10 metres wide. Other than the two dark parallel lines with the white triangles, burn marks (from the Chambéry fire in 1532) and the imprint of an image - front and back - of a man who died from crucifixion, are clearly visible.

The Shroud's history

he Shroud arrived in Turin in 1578 from Chambéry, then the capital of the Duchy of Savoy, and it has been kept in Turin Cathedral ever since.
Reliable historical documents record the Shroud's movements, without interruption, from the mid-fourteenth century. It is known that in 1350s the Shroud was in Lirey, France, and perhaps previously it was in the East, initially in Edessa and later in Constantinople, before being brought to Europe during the Crusades.
In 1453 it was ceded to Duke Louis of Savoy, and followed the ruling family when the capital of Savoy was transferred to Piedmont.
Since 1694 it has been kept (brief interruptions aside) in the splendid chapel that Guarino Guarini built between the Cathedral and the Royal Palace.
Umberto II left the Shroud to the Pope in his will, and in 1983 it became the property of the Holy Sec.
The Holy Shroud has been publicly displayed over the last four centuries, most recently in 1978, to celebrate the four-hundredth anniversary of its arrival in Turin.

he Shroud began to "surprise" a century ago when it was photographed for the first time by Secondo Pia, in 1898.
The negative of that photograph revealed in detail, and with even greater clarity than the positive image, all the "wounds" that the Shroud preserved.

How was the image on the Shroud formed?
Science has not yet come up with any plausible explanations. Below is a list of definitive results from research carried out this century:

the image is not a painting, and it was left by the corpse of a man who was beaten and crucified. Computer processing has shown that the image has three-dimensional properties, something which neither paintings nor standard photographs possess.
Pollens have been found on the cloth, strongly supporting the view that the Shroud spent time not only in Europe but also in the Near East.
Tests on traces of blood from the Shroud have revealed the presence of human blood from blood group AB.
In 1988, carbon-14 dating was carried out on a fragment of the Shroud. The results date the fabric to between 1260 and 1390 A.D.
The scientific community itself now questions these results, and more recent experimental studies have reopened the debate.

Modern science is still investigating how the image was formed, its date, and how best to preserve it.