Nietzsche spent the months before his breakdown in Turin, Italy, nurturing a fetishistic enchantment with the city's baroque architecture and wide, straight boulevards. He lived as a boarder with a family with two daughters, took long walks by himself and, with failing eyesight, scribbled out his shocking autobiography, "Ecce Homo," in a few weeks. By the end of his stay, he began to feel alternately that he was Dionysus, Christ and a royal personage awaiting reception by the Savoys, Italy's royal family, whose palace was within shouting distance of Nietzsche's room.

As his decline steepened, one of the daughters in the house caught him dancing around in the midst of a Dionysian autoerotic exercise. On an afternoon walk down to the River Po, he threw his arms around the neck of a bedraggled cart-horse and collapsed with it to the pavement, talking all the while about his imaginary affair with Cosima Wagner, the composer's second wife. This last episode was one of the final acts in a personal drama that he thought of as his Passion -- the disintegration of personality and sense equaling the final sufferings of Jesus of Nazareth.

These facts came to mind because I was on my way to Turin that day and Nietzsche's history there was one of the few things I knew of the city. My trip was impulsive -- I had bought the ticket only two days earlier. I was going there to satisfy a fascination I had acquired from a good friend and classmate several years earlier.

This friend had gotten to know a professor at the medical school at our university who, for 15 years, had been researching the Shroud of Turin. My friend, by nature skeptical, had slowly come to share the doctor's opinion that the cloth had, in fact, once enshrouded the corpse of Jesus of Nazareth, and that by unexplained means a very complex likeness of the dead man had been formed on the surface of its threads.

Since then I had followed the developments in Shroud of Turin research and through this friend had met some of the primary researchers. I couldn't deny my appetite to see this thing. According to the archbishop of Turin, it will not be on display again until 2025 -- a little postponement meant a very long postponement, so I sprung for the ticket.

But thinking about Nietzsche began to infect my notion of the trip. In an absurd and monumental way, characteristic of the philosopher himself, he seemed to own Turin -- like I would be his guest there and had to adjust to his terms. With nothing else to do, I wondered, and didn't stop throughout my trip: What would Nietzsche -- who helped define the intellectual climate of the 20th century, who attacked Christianity and its God with an appetite for no less than complete decimation -- make of this strip of linen with its ketchup-colored bloodstains and the unexplained picture of the bearded man upon it? Could I visit one without offending the spirit of the other?

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