The Ciabàs is a small Waldensian temple standing where the territories of Angrogna, Luserna San Giovanni and Torre Pellice meet, and it is the oldest Waldensian temple in Italy. The first building went up in 1555; it was then destroyed and rebuilt several times, keeping pace with the persecutions that struck the Waldensian communities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. What you see today dates from 1708 and has come down almost unchanged.
What to see
It is an extremely plain building: a rectangular hall under a pitched roof, plastered white, with two square barred windows flanking the wooden door and nothing else. Above the entrance runs an inscription in French, L'Éternel a pitié de Sion, and a gilded emblem is painted in the gable. There is no bell tower, no apse, no images and no side altars: Reformed architecture gives up almost everything a Catholic church treats as indispensable, and the result looks more like a farmhouse than a place of worship. In front, an iron railing separates the temple from the meadow.
Visiting
Several officers of the Swiss and German regiments that served the House of Savoy in the eighteenth century are buried inside. The best known is baron von Leutrum, who expressly asked to be laid to rest here, having refused conversion to Catholicism to the point of death. The contradiction is the one running through the whole Waldensian story under Savoy rule: in 1655 duke Charles Emmanuel II sent an army corps into the valley to convert the heretical population by force, and in 1690, when the French sacked Luserna, it was Waldensian mountain troops who helped the Piedmontese take it back.
Our editors' tip
Take the place for what it is: not a monument, but the oldest surviving building of a religious minority that in this valley was excommunicated, besieged, exiled and finally tolerated. Between 1686 and 1689 the Waldensians were driven out and came back with the march that went down in history as the Glorious Return; the temple you visit today was built a few years after that homecoming, and has stood ever since. It is worth coming here before climbing the valley towards Torre Pellice and Angrogna, the other two municipalities that meet at this very point.