Naked in Dangerous Places - Cash Peters [112]
Jabbing at the entrées, I decide to celebrate my liberation from the restrictive rigors of making a TV series by going completely nuts for once and choosing pappardelle doused in a robust Bolognese sauce, which arrives thirty minutes later, steaming fresh, heaped in a bowl the size of a cartwheel, and looking just like the one in the photo.
Afterwards, stuffed to bursting but highly satisfied, I set off once again.
Torino's city center was fashioned under the supervision of the House of Savoy family dynasty, who were part Italian, but also part French, which must explain the Parisian flourishes. Somehow the architects condensed it all down and packed it tight, with streets so deep and claustrophobic in places that sunlight has given up hope of ever penetrating the four-and five-story baroque facades, except maybe at a freak angle or reflected off high windows, leaving entire blocks untouched by warmth and with an almost haunted feel to them, enough to give you chills as you hurry along their shadowy rat runs en route to somewhere brighter and more welcoming.
Turning in to a spacious, cobbled yard, I hurry past an impressive church that, in any other city, you'd be tempted to explore and find out the name of. Not here. Here, among so many, you just go, “Pah, whatever!” and, pushing by a cluster of nuns—“Excuse me. Coming through.”—move on to the next fascinating thing.
For a duomo dating back to the fifteenth century that may possibly house one of the most significant religious artifacts of our time, the Cattedrale di San Giovanni Battista's dull, gray-walled exterior is disappointing and reminds me in more ways than one of the Alamo. Indeed, if, someday in the future, interest in the Shroud should wane and the building had to be vacated, it would probably make an excellent storage warehouse. Or even a flagship Taco Bell. Given the overall drabness of what I'm looking at here, I doubt the conversion would arouse much protest.
As my eyes adjust to the interior, I pick out people wafting reverentially among the pews, generating the kind of noises you make when you're trying desperately to be quiet—muted coughing, whispers, the clack of fashionable high heels on marble floors, and occasionally, to someone's eternal shame, stifled laughter.
Hoax or not, there's something enthralling about the Shroud phenomenon. So what if Science happens to be right for once and it's not Christ's burial blanket as he was lifted down from the cross at Calvary, but rather a medieval forgery devised to dupe religious nuts? Who cares, frankly? To a total sucker like me, the mere remote possibility that the tobacco-yellow linen I'm about to look at, touch, and possibly throw over my shoulder and prance around in for photographs, could conceivably have come into contact with Jesus of Nazareth's body all those centuries ago, gives me goosebumps.
“I've come to see the Shroud,” I hiss to a little bald man who works here.
“Okay, come,” he hisses back, and leads me along a pillared walkway to a far corner, where, cocooned within the dark solemnity of a praying area, stands an aquarium-type structure, out of which they drained the water, I guess, and laid the casket. A casket, by the way, that's been dressed up like a Victorian Christmas hamper, wrapped in a red ribbon labeled “Domine,” and topped with a pleasing coil of twigs for decoration. Inside, it's temperature controlled, waterproof, lightproof, and bullet-proof.
“But where's the Shroud of Turin?” I ask, drawing close to the glass.
“This is the Shroud. There is a casket, in which there is another casket…”
“But I don't want to see caskets. I want to see the Shroud.” I sound as if I was expecting it to be just hanging there on a peg.
Shaking his head: “Is not possible. The Shroud, she must remain in the dark, otherwise light can give less visibility to the image over time.”
“But how do I know it's even in there?”
The man looks surprised. “Because I tell you that it is.”
“Oh,” I nod, “in that case it must be!”
With their customary flair for drama and overstatement,