Interactive museum dedicated to the Shroud of Turin opens in Southern California

The content was created primarily by Othonia, a Rome-based group dedicated to the examination of the shroud. The original – a cloth 4.4 metres (14 feet 5 inches) long and 1.1 metres wide – is kept in a bulletproof, climate-controlled case housed in the Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist in Turin, Italy.

The California museum – covering 930 square metres (10,000 sq ft) – contains a life-size laminated visual of the shroud stretched over a wall. It shows the faint image of a man with wounds similar to Christ’s in the story.

The Vatican, while making no claim to the original’s authenticity, has called the cloth a powerful symbol of Christ’s suffering. In 1988, carbon-dating of scraps of the cloth put it as being made in the 13th or 14th century, but some say the results might have been skewed by contamination, calling for larger samples to be analysed.

Many insist that the cloth contains pollen from Jerusalem and is woven in a pattern that was unique to the first century.