AEMI

ELISA GOSSO
south of Frankfurt. The peculiarity of
this group is that in 1974 it established
a twinning agreement with the native
land of their Waldensian ancestors,
Pragelato, in the high Chisone Valley.
In 2014 the two groups celebrated the
40 th anniversary of the twinning, and I
took part in the celebrations as part of
my fieldwork.
Homeland implies another key concept:
‘nostalgia’. This concept is much
discussed in human geography, although
the authors who have written about
it are very eclectic in their researches.
David Lowenthal, for example, in his
The Past is a Foreign Country, introduces
the notion of nostalgia in relation with
the attitude toward the past. In this
conception, it is something related with
time and space that, he says, ‘engulfs the
whole past’ (1985: 6). I think the term is
particularly useful in analyzing diaspora,
as it derives from the Greek nostos, that
means ‘return to native land’, and algos,
‘suffering’ or ‘grief’, and is therefore connected
with the concept of homeland
and its representation. Another author
who uses the concept of nostalgia is an
American geographer Dallen Timothy
whose studies are particularly focused
on genealogical tourism. He analyzes the
connection between diasporic groups
and tourism to their lands of origin and
he speaks of a complex of emotions and
a ‘sense of nostalgia’, which would help
to idealize the past and the places of origin
and, at the same time, would help to
create a desire to visit these places: ‘Nostalgia
implies a yearning for some past
socio-spatial condition(s)’ (2008: 118).
This attitude is highlighted by a notion
borrowed from another geographer,
Yi Fu Tuan (1974), who speaks of
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topophilia, a relationship of deep affection
that exists between a physical space
and human feelings. According to the
author, topophilia derives from the surrounding
reality, and people pay attention
to those aspects of the environment
that command awe, or promise support
and fulfillment in the context of their
lives’ purposes.
There is little doubt that the people
of Waldensergemeinde Rohrbach-Wembach-Hahn
feel a deep topophilia for their
homeland and manifest it with travels
to this place of origin. I identified three
kinds of travel. The first is a personal or
family travel, while the second and the
third are group travels: in the first case,
the community visits Pragelato and the
Valleys during the twinning’s celebrations,
while in the second case young
people of the community who just did
their confirmation 4 in the church have
the habit of visiting together the land of
origin of their ancestors as a sort of rite
of passage. David Timothy Duval, an
American lecturer in Tourism studies,
defines the return visit as a periodic, but
temporary, sojourn made by members
of diasporic communities to either their
external homeland or another location
in which strong social ties have been
forged (Duval, 2004).
Pragelato, the homeland of German
Waldensians, possesses some characteristics
that attracted my attention, the
most striking one being that it is now
a ‘Catholic town’, and I observed that
the religious dimension has a very significant
role in the life of the community.
After the Waldensian exile, the
high Chisone Valley was catholicized
and it was excluded from the process of
creation of the Waldensian Valleys’ rep-