Cathedral of Saint John (Shroud of Turin)

Turin's cathedral is a relatively plain late-fifteenth-century Renaissance church, and most of the time it would not detain you for long. But it is home to the Shroud of Turin, the most famous and most argued-over relic in Christendom, locked in a side chapel rebuilt after a 1997 fire nearly destroyed it.

The shroud itself is rarely shown. Visit instead to see Guarini's reconstructed Chapel of the Holy Shroud, an extraordinary feat of black-marble Baroque engineering that piles geometry on geometry as it climbs to a star-shaped opening overhead. After the fire it was painstakingly rebuilt; the chapel reopened in 2018.

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The shroud is shown publicly only every few decades — most recently in 2015. The rest of the time you see a high-quality photograph in front of the locked chapel. The fourteen-foot strip of linen, dated by carbon to the medieval period but cherished as the burial cloth of Christ, lives in a climate-controlled case.

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