Waldensian Museum and Occitan Multimedia Museum

The Waldensian Museum occupies the upper floor of the “Gian Luigi Pascale” cultural centre, the house that the Tavola Valdese named after the pastor from Cuneo who came to preach at La Guardia in 1559 and was burned in Rome the following year. The centre was opened in 1983, on the occasion of the twinning with Torre Pellice, as a witness to the last Waldensian colony in Calabria; closed from 1998, it was renovated and reopened on 5 June 2010, and the museum reopened in 2011, on the 450th anniversary of the massacre of the Waldensians of Calabria and Apulia. Panels, documents and finds tell the story of the Waldensians in Calabria and in the world, from the arrival of the “ultramontane” settlers to the Inquisition’s ordinances, from the night of 1561 to the diaspora towards Geneva and the Piedmont valleys; one of the old peephole doors is displayed here, restored. On the ground floor is the recreation centre, on the upper floors a few lodgings for visitors; the building is funded by the Waldensian Church’s eight-per-thousand and, for Calabrian schools, is the reference point on the history of minorities.

The municipal Occitan Multimedia Museum was opened on 22 January 2011: through video, reportage and a multimedia trail it tells of Occitan culture in Europe, in Italy and in Guardia, and houses an exhibition room, a conference room and a library with a section devoted to Calabria’s three linguistic minorities, Occitan, Greek and Albanian. Together, the two museums explain how a langue d’oc has survived for eight centuries on a hill above the Tyrrhenian.