The Vaudois of Piedmont: A Visit to Their Valleys

In the spring of 1871, a British pastor named J.N. Worsfold sets out from Pallanza on Easter Monday, bound for the legendary valleys of Piedmont. What he finds there is a people who have survived centuries of persecution for their Protestant faith, who have been hunted through these mountains and who have, against all odds, endured. Worsfold's account interweaves the vivid pleasures of 19th-century Alpine travel with a deep reverence for the Waldensian story: the early witnesses, the medieval martyrs, the long years of suffering under Catholic powers, and the recent political liberties that have allowed this resilient community to emerge into daylight. He walks through valleys that hold the bones of the faithful, meets figures of the Waldensian Church, and renders the Italian landscape with the appreciative eye of a traveler encountering beauty for the first time. Written as a compact companion to larger scholarly works, this is nonetheless a book animated by genuine wonder at what faith and stubbornness have preserved in these remote highlands.