John Ruskin e le Valli valdesi: etica protestante e conservazione del patrimonio comunitario

When John Ruskin visited the Waldensian Valleys in 1858, the process of patrimonialisation of their historical places had been started for several decades. This happened thanks to the visit of many British Reformed, who went to those territories to seek a primitive apostolic and faith-resistance world. Through this impulse, the Waldenses began to monumentalize and preserve these places exercising maintenance, a practice linked to the principle of personal responsibility typical of Protestant churches. Later, with the entry into the Waldensian cultural scene of Paolo Paschetto (early XX Century), it is probable that Ruskin's theories began to be known and put into practice with a greater systematicity, an eventuality of which the echoes - perhaps unconscious - may still be felt in the present day.