Chapel of the Holy Shroud

Chapel of the Holy Shroud tickets: which one to buy

The chapel is entered through the Royal Museums of Turin and is covered by their ticket, which also includes the Royal Palace, the armoury, the gallery and the archaeology museum; there is no separate cheaper entry. The ticket is valid for the whole complex and easily fills half a day. Guided tours of the royal apartments include the chapel and cost several times the entry.

The Shroud itself is not on display: it is kept rolled in a climate-controlled case in the cathedral next door and has been shown publicly only a handful of times in the last century, most recently in 2015, with the next exposition unannounced. Visitors expecting to see it are routinely disappointed, and the museum is clear about this. The cathedral itself is free. A combined ticket with the Savoy residences outside the city is sold at the museum desk and is valid for several days.

Visiting Chapel of the Holy Shroud: what to see

Guarino Guarini, priest, mathematician and architect, built the chapel between 1668 and 1694 to hold the Shroud, and the result is one of the strangest structures of the baroque. The dome is not a dome in any ordinary sense: thirty-six segmental arches are stacked in six tiers, each one springing from the middle of the pair below, so that the eye climbing it sees a receding honeycomb of hexagons narrowing to a twelve-pointed star with a dove at the centre.

The device comes from Islamic vaulting that Guarini had studied, and no one else has ever built anything quite like it. Black marble lines the walls. A fire in 1997 nearly destroyed the chapel and the restoration took twenty-one years, reassembling calcined stone piece by piece; it reopened in 2018 and the scorched marble was deliberately left visible in places. The black marble came from quarries at Frabosa in the Piedmontese mountains, and Guarini specified it to make the light from above appear to come from another world.

Chapel of the Holy Shroud opening hours and the best time to go

The Royal Museums open Tuesday to Sunday and close on Mondays, from mid-morning to evening with last entry an hour before. The chapel is at the end of the route through the palace, so allow time to reach it. The dome is lit by daylight through its own windows and reads best in the middle of the day. Turin is cold and often foggy in winter and pleasantly warm in summer, and the museum is one of the least crowded major sites in Italy.

Photography without flash is allowed. Allow half a day for the whole complex, forty minutes for the chapel and the cathedral. The Egyptian Museum, the second most important in the world, is five minutes away and deserves its own day. Turin's arcaded streets connect the palace to Piazza San Carlo, and the historic cafes along them have been serving since the eighteenth century.