Chanforan

Commemorative monument at the
field of Chanforan

A meadow at Serre in the Angrogna Valley where in their Synod of 1532 the Waldensian leadership considered the appeal of Swiss reformers and acted to stream into the Protestant Reformation.

Four hundred years later, in 1932, a monument based upon the design of the artist Paolo Paschetto was erected on the site.

from ALLE PORTE D'ITALIA, a book by the famous italian writer Edmondo De Amicis (1884)

The Waldensian Thermopylae: Chanforan

«...We came upon a point, called Chanforan--possibly after an ancient hamlet, now a stand of chestnut trees--where there took place the celebrated Synod of 1532, in which Waldensian leadership far and near agreed to adhere to the Reformation; further, they worked out a declaration of faith, 17 articles, which, with another from the 12th century, would take its place as a Waldensian foundation document.

Here, too, very near the same site, just after the not unexpected edict of Vittorio Amedeo II (in 1686, paralleling in Savoy the revocation in France of the Edict of Nantes), there took place that tragic assembly--begun with solemn prayer led by Enrico Arnaud, future leader of the Glorious Return, attended by diplomats from the six Protestant cantons in Switzerland, and accompanied by tears and anguished cries--faced with two desperate alternatives: either abandoning the native soil, or fighting on, without hope, to the last drop of blood. ...»

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