Turin Cathedral

Turin Cathedral tickets: which one to buy

The cathedral is free and stands beside the royal palace, a few minutes from the main square, so it needs no booking. What people actually come for is the shroud, and the important thing to understand before travelling is that it is not on display. The cloth is kept sealed in a climate-controlled case in a side area of the church and is shown publicly only during rare expositions announced years in advance; the last general showing was in 2015.

A photographic display beside the chapel explains it in the meantime, and a separate museum elsewhere in the city covers the scientific history in detail. Walking tours of the centre link the cathedral with the Roman gate, the palace and the Egyptian museum, which is the strongest collection of its kind outside Cairo. If your interest is architecture rather than relics, come for the chapel of the shroud itself, which reopened in 2018 after twenty-one years of restoration.

Visiting Turin Cathedral: what to see

The cathedral was built between 1491 and 1498 and is the only significant Renaissance building in Turin, a city otherwise made of baroque and nineteenth-century arcades. Three earlier churches on the site were demolished to make room, and the bell tower beside it predates the church by twenty years. The interior is calm and comparatively plain.

The extraordinary part is behind and above the high altar: the chapel built by Guarino Guarini between 1668 and 1694 to house the shroud, a black marble drum rising into a cone of interlocking arches that step upward in diminishing hexagons towards a burst of light at the top. It is one of the boldest pieces of geometry in European architecture. A fire in 1997 gutted it, the cloth was rescued by a fireman who broke the bulletproof glass, and the restoration that followed took two decades and reused the salvaged marble where it could.

Turin Cathedral opening hours and the best time to go

Turin is at its best in spring and autumn; winter is foggy and cold, summer heavy. The cathedral keeps a midday break and closes for services. The chapel of the shroud is entered from the royal museums rather than from the nave for part of the week, which confuses people, so check which door is in use. The square outside is small and the best view of the dome is from the palace gardens. Expositions of the shroud, when they happen, bring millions of people over several weeks and require free booking months ahead;

nothing else in the city functions normally during them. The Egyptian museum and the cinema museum in the tower are the other two essential stops and both need half a day each. Chocolate and coffee houses under the arcades are an institution here. Allow half an hour in the cathedral, longer if the chapel is open. Guided visits of the chapel run at fixed hours in the afternoon and are limited to small groups because the floor area is tiny.