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Exactly. As it happens, there's a simple stone cup that fits both the legend and the realities of historical Judea perfectly. According to Catholic history, Saint Peter carried a simple agate cup (a semi-translucent polished stone) which he used to perform communions. Agate was a popular material in ancient times for adornment and decoration. It wasn't as valuable as gold, but it was more valuable than simple terra cotta and would have been a nice piece for a Jewish household to celebrate Passover with. You may recall what the dinner was for, and why this fits. Peter himself claimed that the cup was the cup of the Last Supper, a cup which would later become known as the Holy Grail. The cup was used by early popes for centuries, before it was finally given to Lawrence (Lorenzo) to hide. At that point it "officially" disappears from history. Up to this point, it's all well recorded.

Shortly afterward, a guy named Proselius showed up on the doorstep of Lawrences parents home in Spain with a story and a treasure. Proselius held a simple agate cup which perfectly matched the description of the now-hidden Holy Chalice. When Lawrence realized that he was about to be arrested, he wrote a letter describing the cup, and gave it to Proselius, a Christian Roman soldier and a friend, and asked him to take it to Spain. After Pope Sixtus was executed, Saint Lawrence was ordered to turn over all the riches of the Church to the Emperor of Rome. He asked for three days to gather the treasures, which was granted. Instead of doing so, he gave the treasures away to the poor, and gave many of the more venerable items to friends for safekeeping. According to Ambrose, he was executed for defying the emperor. Shortly after that, Proselius turned up in Spain with a package for his parents. Inside was the simple agate cup, along with a letter explaining that this was the Holy Chalice and the cup that Christ drank from at the last supper. They took the cup and letter to a monastary, where it remained for the next thousand years. There's little documentation about it from this period, but apparently the monks who lived in the monastary during that period only existed to guard the chalice and the letter. After a thousand years, the cup changed hands a few times during some very well documented transfers between kings, before finally ending up in the Cathedral of Valencia, where it sits today.

People looking at the cup today see a beautiful golden chalice adorned with pearls, rubies, and other gems, topped with a small brown, almost dirty looking cup. What they often don't realize is that the gold is simply a base designed sometime in the middle ages to support a simple stone cup.

Personally, I think the hunt for the grail is nonsense. I believe it does exist, and it's sitting in a cathedral in Spain. The cup's design fits, it matches early descriptions of the Holy Chalice, and the story behind its transfer fits extremely well with known history.

Interestingly, unlike many so called "holy relics" that heal people in their waters, grant luck, or do a gazillion other supernatural things, there is no claims to supernatural powers surrounding the Chalice of Valencia. It's just a stone cup with a pretty base that Jesus happened to drink out of (if you believe the story, anyway).

From the Cathedral of Valencia.

Or;

The Jerusalem Chalice

The earliest record of a chalice from the Last Supper is the account of Arculf a 7th-century Anglo-Saxon pilgrim who described it in De locis sanctis as being located in a reliquary in a chapel near Jerusalem, between the basilica of Golgotha and the Martyrium. He described it as a two-handled silver chalice with the measure of a Gaulish pint. Arculf kissed his hand and reached through an opening of the perforated lid of the reliquary to touch the chalice. He said that the people of the city flocked to it with great veneration. (Arculf also saw the Holy Lance in the porch of the basilica of Constantine.) This is the only mention of the Holy Chalice being situated in the Holy Land.

Or;

The Genoa Chalice

Of two vessels that survive today, one is at Genoa, in the cathedral. The hexagonal vessel is known as the sacro catino, the holy basin. Traditionally said to be carved from emerald, it is in fact a green Egyptian glass dish, about eighteen inches (37 cm) across. It was sent to Paris after Napoleon’s conquest of Italy, and was returned broken, which identified the emerald as glass. Its origin is uncertain; according to William of Tyre, writing in about 1170, it was found in the mosque at Caesarea in 1101: "a vase of brilliant green shaped like a bowl." The Genoese, believing that it was of emerald, accepted it in lieu of a large sum of money. An alternative story in a Spanish chronicle says that it was found when Alfonso VII of Castile captured Almería from the Moors in 1147 with Genoese help, un vaso de piedra esmeralda que era tamanno como una escudiella, "a vase carved from emerald which was like a dish". The Genoese said that this was the only thing they wanted from the sack of Almería. The identification of the sacro catino with the Holy Chalice is not made until later, however, by Jacobus de Voragine in his chronicle of Genoa, written at the close of the 13th century.

Personally, I think the hunt for the grail is nonsense. I believe it does exist, and it's sitting in a cathedral in Spain. The cup's design fits, it matches early descriptions of the Holy Chalice, and the story behind its transfer fits extremely well with known history.

I don't remember where I read it, nor do I speak French, so I could not confirm it, But the jist of the passage I had read stated that there is a small difference between grail ("graal") and "gra' al" (or something like that)in the French language... one meaning cup or chalice, while the other means (roughly) burial cloth.

Considering the fact that the Shroud of Turin was almost certainly brought to France by the Crusaders, and arose at about the time of the beginning of the earliest grail-like stories involving knights and etc, it is interesting to propose that the grail stories were generated from a misspelling or mistranslation of the rumored (at the time) burial cloth of Christ, as the tale of it's recovery reached mythic proportions.

Mind you, I do not write to dispute the Cup of Christ, but to suppose the "Grail" to be a different thing.

I do not suggest that the grail/burial cloth thing is true- As I said, it was a thing briefly read a long time ago, so if anyone can speak with authority on the subject, I would be happy to be corrected...

-Bruce