Porta del Sangue and the places of Waldensian memory

The Porta del Sangue is the main entrance to the old walls of Guardia Piemontese: an arch of cobbles, brick fragments and roughly hewn stones held by mortar. Its name comes from the night of 5 June 1561. After the Roman Inquisition had imposed on the village’s Waldensians ordinances forbidding them to gather, to speak Occitan and to marry among themselves, the community had rebelled; the troops of the viceroy of Naples led by Marino and Ascanio Caracciolo, who had already sacked San Sisto on 29 May, arrived beneath the walls. According to the most widespread account the feudal lord Salvatore Spinelli brought in fifty soldiers disguised as prisoners: at night they opened this gate and the massacre swept away hundreds of people, thrown from the tower, put to the sword or burned, while seventy houses went up in flames. The blood, tradition says, ran down from the castle along the alleys until it passed beyond the gate. A few steps away opens the small Porta Carruggio, the walls’ secondary entrance.

In the old town remain the peephole doors, which open only from outside: the Inquisition imposed them after the massacre, so that the Dominican friars who arrived in the 17th century could watch over the private lives of the forcibly converted survivors. One, restored, can be seen in the Waldensian Museum, at least three along the streets. In piazza Chiesa Valdese, where the temple of the reformed built with Gian Luigi Pascale in 1559 once stood, is the Val Pellice Rock, a slab of Alpine rock brought in 1975 from Torre Pellice with the verse of Isaiah “Look to the rock from which you were hewn”; below, the plaque lists the 118 names of the people of Guardia who were killed. Since 2008 the 5th of June has been the Day of Remembrance, and the Waldensian Museum of the “Gian Luigi Pascale” cultural centre, reopened in 2011 for the 450th anniversary of the massacre, tells its story with documents and finds.