AEMI

204 AEMI JOURNAL 2015 2016
resentation. The priest of Pragelato, with
the mayor, was one of the central figures
of the twinning celebrations. He organized
the visit of the Germans to Pragelato
in the month of September 2014.
On that occasion there were two ecumenical
celebrations, jointly performed
by the Catholic priest, a Waldensian
Italian minister and the minister of the
German community.
The first celebration took place in
the so-called ‘places of memory’: Laval
and Troncea, the two highest hamlets
of Pragelato. Laval is uninhabited since
1942, but in the summer the shepherds
use the village as a base to reach
the highest pastures. Here there is an
old church, S. Giacomo, where the celebration
was held. This building has a
symbolic meaning for two reasons. The
bell of the church is the ancient bell of
the old Waldensian temple, destroyed in
the seventeenth century, and the church
itself was erected as late as 1698. Moreover,
the small cemetery next to the
church, called the ‘graveyard of the miners’,
contains the victims of an avalanche
that in 1904 overwhelmed the workers
who were coming downhill from the
mines of Beth, about one hundred meters
above Laval. The tragedy of Beth,
though painful, marks the history of the
Pragelato community. The miners who
lost their lives in that accident were both
Catholics and Waldensians, originating
from the nearby Waldensian Valleys.
The episode is therefore very significant
in the twinning celebration, so that the
priest and the pastor mentioned it in
their speeches.
Transnational Heritage in Diasporic
Communities
Another feature I identified in my research
is the notion of ‘heritage’. David
Lowenthal observed that heritage clarifies
pasts so as to infuse them with present
purposes (1998). Each Waldensian
transnational group I met identifies itself
with a Waldensian heritage (Gosso,
2015). Some testimonies from my fieldwork
are particularly significant:
We are Americans, but this is our heritage»
(G. L. C., Waldensian Presbyterian
Church, Valdese, USA, 2014).
The doctrine and the tradition of my ancestors
belong to me» (C. L., Waldensergemeinde
Rohrbach-Wembach-Hahn,
Germany, 2014).
I consider myself very blessed to have a
rich heritage and legacy left to me by the
Waldensian people of the Piedmont Valleys
of Italy» (S. G., Cardon Families Organization,
USA, 2014).
Heritage was a word very much used by
my informants to describe their identification
within the Waldensian world,
and it was a useful term also for me
to describe them, because, as I said for
the case of the Germans, Waldensians
abroad gradually migrated into other
religious denominations. The only exception
is the case of the Waldensians
who migrated to South America, where
they maintained an official Waldensian
Church (Geymonat, 1994). What is interesting
today is that in Italy it is possible
to convert and become a Waldensian,
while in the cases of Germany and
North America people are Waldensian
by birth (Watts, 1947), which entails