Which reminds me, to those of you insulted by my spelling suckiness, my deepest apologies. Well, maybe not my deepest. Perhaps something mid-level just between, “Sorry I farted” and “Sorry I ran over your cat.”

Also to the man who wrote and explained in great detail the health benefits of the bidet, my hats (and my shorts) off to you. I’m considering getting one for my home.

One last note on the bidet topic. The dorm room I’m staying in has its own bathroom but no official bidet. It has a rubber hose clipped to the wall next to the toilet. The head of the hose is the same exact trigger fixture at the end of the hose sitting next to your kitchen faucet. Which of course makes me wonder if I need a bidet at all. Why, when I have an Italian “bidet hose” on my kitchen sink? I suppose I’ll need some sort of step-ladder… and there are probably sanitary issues if I wash my butt in the kitchen sink, though. I need to think that through.

Okay, onward and hopefully upward.

I don’t speak a lot of Italian. And Italians pretend they don’t speak English… when I’m around.

So we’re in Torino… Turin for you foreigners. I’m looking for one for the most famous relics on earth. It’s supposed to be an easy day. We go downtown, we ask around, everyone knows where the museum is and we do our story… ba-da-bing!

Wow! I am a serious knucklehead. Clueless and didn’t know it. Which sounds a lot like the definition of clueless. I never saw it coming.

I’m walking around the center of Torino, called Piazza Castello (i.e. plaza of the castle. Yes there’s a castle in the middle of town. No biggie. There are castles on every corner here.), asking for The Shroud of Turin. Now I know it’s near the middle of town. And I know it’s a truly famous historical object, officially recognized by the Pope to be the burial cloth of Jesus Christ. Followers believe Christ’s image was somehow transferred to the cloth, perhaps during resurrection.

I won’t even go into all the debatable data contradicting or supporting that claim. Whatever the truth is, this piece of fabric is famous, precious cargo, stored in an airtight display and rarely open for public viewing. I was hoping the spectacle that is the Winter Olympics, with the world’s attention focused right here, would have encouraged the church to reveal it to the public once again. Clueless I tell you. Clueless.

But my first hope was simply to find it!

There are a good many English and non-English speaking people who know of Torino strictly through The Shroud of Turin. Wait. Some guys my age know it as the city with the same name as that cool car from the old hit TV show “Starsky & Hutch.” You know, the red Gran Torino with the white stripe? Loved it.

Where was I?

Oh… but The Shroud is sort of Torino’s (the town not the car) claim to world-wide fame. Yes Torino is where Fiat is from. Yes it’s the chocolate capital of Italy. Yes it’s the gateway to the Italian Alps and yes… now everyone will think of it as the home for the 2006 Winter Olympics. But if you say the word “Turin,” I’ll bet you most people’s first connected thought is The Shroud.

And you would think that if that phrase, “The Shroud of Turin,” is what so many others around the world are familiar with, Italians would have heard it too. Especially peeps who live in Torino. Especially peeps working a few hundred feet from The Shroud.

Well, I would be dead wrong about that. One after another, locals stared at me like I was looking for a small unknown crater on the surface of the moon. As if they had never heard the word “Shroud.” As if it didn’t exist at all.

At one point I was standing a couple hundred feet from the building housing The Shroud and no one could help me. I felt ridiculous and helpless.

Finally one English speaking Italian overheard me asking the Polizia (police) and offered to walk us right to the door of the cathedral where The Shroud is kept. I practically skipped down the sidewalk I was so happy.

We walk in and there it is, a man speaking in Italian giving a tour group a look at a giant photograph of The Shroud. Turns out The Shroud was last displayed in 2000. And the church has no plans to bring it out from its tomb for the Olympics. Bummer.

Even worse, when I ask the Italian tour guide for some information he points to a stack of pamphlets on a marble countertop. On the front of the pamphlet are the words, “The Turin Shroud.”

Unbelievable.

You can actually watch the television version of that story tonight on WCNC. It airs at 7:30 in the Olympic “Ozone” show. After that, watch the opening ceremonies of the 2006 Winter Olympics!

I’ve decide to NOT write journals on the weekends. Too tired. I’ll see if Andy wants to. Otherwise I’ll see you back here on Monday.

Ciao, Americanos!