Читать книгу Through the Italian Alps. The GTA - The Grande Traversata delle Alpi онлайн

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On the other hand the Waldenses, a local Protestant group, have a terrible history of persecution. They are known in Italian as the Valdesi after their founder Valdo, a wealthy 12th-century merchant from Lyon who gave away all his worldly goods and turned to evangelism. Attracted by the simple values, many Piemontese joined his ranks. However, all followers were excommunicated by the Catholic Church and, despite the Reformation, were massacred in Italy’s Valle Pellice in 1655. Dubbed the ‘Piedmont Easters’ the episode drew indignation and solidarity from Protestant groups throu ghout Europe, prompting Cromwell to dispatch an ambassador to Turin to protest, and inspiring John Milton to compose ‘On the Late Massacher in Piemont’:

Avenge O Lord thy slaughter’d Saints, whose bones

Lie scatter’d on the Alpine mountains cold.

During the so-called ‘Glorioso Rimpatrio’, ‘glorious return home’ from exile in Switzerland in 1689–90 – a fortnight-long march across treacherous alpine passes – a 370-strong group held out all winter long on a ridge above Balsiglia. Trapped in a treacherous circle by 4000 enemy troops equipped with cannons, the Waldenses were saved by thick providential fog. Only days later the Italian king allied his country with Protestant Austria and England and broke with Catholic France, making life somewhat easier for the Waldenses, estimated at 30,000 in Italy today. As of late medieval times, Piedmont was the stronghold of the expanding Savoy dynasty, a prosperous and powerful regime that at a much later date (1861) provided modern Italy with its very first king, Vittorio Emanuele II.