Pierluigi Baima Bollone (photo Diana Bagnoli)
The professor will be remembered as the “scientist of the Shroud”. Pierluigi Baima Bollone who passed away in Turin on Wednesday 5 November at the age of 88.
Forensic doctor and university professor, he was born in Turin on 23 April 1937. From 1972 he was a full professor of forensic medicine at the university for over thirty years and his manual is still an academic reference point today for students and investigators. A scientific authority that led him to many technical consultancies for the courts. His autopsies and his observations as an anatomopathologist were requested in many judicial investigations, from the Pecorelli case to the murder of Aldo Moro, helping to resolve many judicial or highly popular cases, such as that of San Gennaro, recognizing the presence of real human blood in the ampoule that contains it. But the mystery he was passionate about all his life was linked to the Shroud, the sheet that according to tradition wrapped Jesus Christ immediately after his death on the Cross.
In 1978 the church admitted experts to carry out the examination of some fibers of the sacred linen, in which Baima Bollone found human blood of group AB and traces of aloe and myrrh, all dating back to the 1st century. Then came the carbon 14 investigations with medieval dating, the denials, the controversies within the scientific world on methods and reconstructions, which still do not give definitive answers today. For Baima Bollone the Shroud was the mystery of life, to which she dedicated 160 articles and 24 books. Honorary President of the International Center for Sindonology, he rigorously defended the authenticity of the Shroud until his death.
Here is the latest interview given to the weekly Believe.
Pierluigi Baima Bollone is one of the most accredited scholars of the Shroud. For decades he held the chair of Forensic Medicine at both the Faculty of Law and Medicine at the University of Turin and trained generations of doctors and jurists. Few professors can boast his authority. He was responsible for the encounter between the Shroud and medicine and, in addition to the volumes dedicated to university research, he was responsible for around twenty books on the linen cloth now kept in a chapel of the Turin Cathedral, inside a watertight case.
Professor Baima Bollone, born in 1937, has never interrupted his studies or research and his latest work entitled Jesus and the Shroud published by San Paolo will soon be released.
Professor, looking back, how much space in your life was occupied by the Shroud?
«I think I can give you a fairly precise answer. I worked on the Shroud, on average, about two hours a day. Since 1976.”
How did it start?
«In those years I was involved in the search for blood traces in Forensic Medicine and Don Piero Coero Borga, who was rector of the Confraternity of the Holy Shroud of Turin and secretary of the International Center for Sindonology, who I define as “the father of the Shroud”, asked me for a technical opinion. I responded with a letter in which I detailed what I would do to understand the origin of the blood traces on the cloth. That letter, without my knowing anything about it, became part of a book by Don Coero himself. And so I found myself, without knowing it, being counted as an expert on the Shroud.”
(Top photo: Diana Bagnoli)
