Thousands of faithful and curious Italians have visited a statue of Christ after a woman said she saw the face of mystic monk Padre Pio appear on the bronze figure in the northwestern city of Genoa.
"The Cardinal of Genoa came to see it last night and he agreed that there was a face but said that further investigations were needed," Mauro Boccaccio, spokesman for the regional government of Liguria, said on Friday.
Boccaccio said a woman was first to notice the face appear on Wednesday when she came to view the Christ of the Deep, a bronze figure of Christ that artist Guido Galletti designed in the 1950s to be submersed under the sea.
Padre Pio was said to have the power to be in two places at once and to display the stigmata -- bleeding wounds in the hands and feet similar to those of Christ. He died in 1968 and was made a saint in 2002. Some eight million pilgrims visit the town where he is buried each year.
The Christ of the Deep statue has been undergoing restoration work for the past eight months and is due to be returned to the sea on June 26.
"It's an icon for thousands of divers from Italy and from abroad, both believers and others," Boccaccio said.
Authorities were still planning to return it to the sea near the town of Portofino, though investigations into the vision could delay that, he added.
More than 5,000 people came to see the statue, which still appears to show a face, on Thursday alone.
"They're still lining up today," Boccaccio said.