This story revolves around a finger

Last update: November 20, 2009 - 8:05 PM

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Two fingers and a tooth removed from Galileo Galilei's corpse in a Florentine basilica in the 18th century and given up for lost have been found and will be put on display in the spring, an Italian museum director said Friday. Several relics were removed from the body of the Earth-revolves-around-the-sun astronomer by admirers in 1737, 95 years after his death, as his corpse was being moved to a tomb in Santa Croce Basilica in Florence. But the tooth and two fingers were kept by an admirer, an Italian marquis, and later enclosed in an 18th-century blown-glass vase that was passed on from generation to generation in the same family, Paolo Galluzzi, the museum's director, said, until "the generations lost knowledge of what was actually inside the container," and the family sold it. The container recently turned up at auction and was purchased by a private collector, intrigued by the contents but not even sure they were Galileo's relics until confirmed by Florence culture officials.

A NEW TWIST TO TURIN DEBATE

A Vatican researcher has rekindled the age-old debate over the Shroud of Turin, saying that faint writing on the linen proves it was the burial cloth of Jesus.

Barbara Frale says in a new book that she used computer-enhanced images of the shroud (the facial area at left) to decipher faintly written words in Greek, Latin and Aramaic that include the name Jesus of Nazareth in Greek. That, she said, proves the text could not be of medieval origin because no Christian at the time, even a forger, would have mentioned Jesus without referring to his divinity. Failing to do so would risk being branded a heretic. "Even someone intent on forging a relic would have had all the reasons to place the signs of divinity on this object," Frale said Friday. "Had we found 'Christ' or the 'Son of God' we could have considered it a hoax, or a devotional inscription." Experts say the historian may be reading too much into the markings, and they stand by carbon-dating that points to the shroud being a medieval forgery.

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