In a small Italian village in the Abruzzo, a piece of cloth measuring seventeen and a half by twenty-four centimetres is displayed in the basilica of the Holy Face. Painted on the cloth, in pigments no microscope has been able to identify, is the face of a man with open eyes and a serene expression. The image is visible from both sides of the cloth at once.

The village is called Manoppello, twelve miles southwest of Chieti in central Italy. The cloth has been continuously displayed there since at least 1638, when the local chronicler Donato of Bomba recorded that it had already been venerated in the village for at least a century. The Capuchin friars still display it today. The cloth itself appears to be byssus, a rare natural fibre harvested from the beard of a Mediterranean mussel called Pinna nobilis.

Three things about the cloth defy explanation. First, byssus is chemically incapable of accepting paint. Its proteins reject pigment. The fibre will not dye. Second, the image of the face is visible from both sides of the cloth at the same orientation, like a slide projected onto a translucent screen. No painting technique known to art history can produce that effect on woven fibre. Third, a German Trappistine iconographer named Sister Blandina Paschalis Schlömer placed an exact-scale photographic transparency of the Manoppello image over a transparency of the Shroud of Turin. The data points lined up perfectly. The two faces, separated by Italy and by tradition, mapped onto one another bone for bone.

In 1999, the German Jesuit and Vatican art historian Heinrich Pfeiffer announced that he believed the Manoppello image was the original Veil of Veronica. The Vatican still owns a reliquary frame in the treasure chamber of Saint Peter's that is supposed to hold the Veronica. The frame has been visibly empty since the renovations of the basilica in the early sixteen hundreds. Pfeiffer's claim is contested. Manoppello's own records say the cloth was already in the village a century before the Vatican relic disappeared.

On the first of September, 2006, Pope Benedict the Sixteenth flew by helicopter to Manoppello and knelt before the cloth. He was the first pope in over four hundred years to venerate it. Within months, he raised the sanctuary to a minor basilica. The cloth is still there, in a silver reliquary above the altar. The face is still visible from both sides.

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