Although it has nothing to do with magic, the 19th-century tolerance for religions other than the Catholic Church in Turin helped create the myth of the “capital of alternative spiritualities”
Massimo Introvigne*
*Lecture in the City Council Chamber of Settimo Torinese (Turin), January 18, 2025.
Article 3 of 4. Read article 1 and article 2.
It is necessary to mention a third track that has nothing to do with magic but contributed to the birth of the myth of Turin as the “capital of alternative spirituality.” It was the search in the 19th century for relationships with the sacred, with religion, and with the afterlife outside the familiar paths traced by the Catholic Church, unpopular with both the government and some city elites for its hostility to the Risorgimento. Occultism, Spiritism, and even the more “metaphysical” explanations of magnetism already constituted as many manifestations of a religious spirit seeking alternatives to the dominant Catholicism. Not everyone was willing to go as far as the dangerous frontiers of the occult, but many were caught up in the same anxieties.
Growing in Turin, after King Charles Albert’s edict of February 17, 1848, granting it full civil rights, the ancient Waldensian community was also aggregating foreign Protestant families who had come to Piedmont for various reasons. The Waldensian community, whose sober Protestantism is a far cry from the paths of the city of wonders, comes into consideration in our history mainly because of the mythical image of it in English-language Protestant literature. A holography and hagiography about the Waldensians circulated in Britain and the United States. It convinced many new Christian denominations that the Waldensians, whom they imagined to be in a state of perpetual fervor and prophetic expectation, were ready to convert to new truths as soon as they knew them. Thus, several Christian movements in the 19th century began their history in Italy precisely from Pinerolo or Torre Pellice.
In 1850 the Mormons sent their first Italian mission to the Waldensian Valleys led by Lorenzo Snow, the future fifth president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
The first Mormon propaganda work published in Italy, Lorenzo Snow’s “La Voix de Joseph,” was written in French with the Waldensians in mind but published in Turin by the Ferrero and Franco printing house in 1851. Unsure of the religious freedom that had been in place for a few years in the Kingdom of Sardinia, Snow thought it best to place an image of a Catholic nun carrying a cross and chalice on the cover.
Clearly an expansion to Turin was not ruled out since volumes were beginning to be printed in Italian (the first Italian translation of the “Book of Mormon” was published in London in 1852), while the Waldensians spoke French. Even the closest competitors of the Utah Mormons, the exponents of the Reorganized Church of Latter Day Saints, sent one of their missionaries, John Avondet, to the Waldensian Valleys in 1872, where he succeeded in baptizing only two people. In 1867, the mainline LDS mission was closed after converting some eighty Waldensians who emigrated to Utah. Meanwhile, Brigham Young, the legendary second president of the LDS Church, had become convinced that the Waldensians “are not the kind of people ready to receive [our] gospel quickly.”
A few years later it was the turn of the Bible Students, the predecessors of today’s Jehovah’s Witnesses. In 1891, Pinerolo was visited by the founder of the Biblical Students, Charles Taze Russell, himself, who returned to Piedmont in 1912. The group, concentrated in the Waldensian Valleys, then numbered about forty followers. The first Italian office of Jehovah’s Witnesses was opened in Pinerolo in 1919, and the first convention was held there, on April 23–26, 1925.
On behalf of the Seventh-day Adventists first came to Italy former Polish Catholic friar Michał Belina Czechowski, who in 1864 typically set up his base of operations in Luserna San Giovanni, in the Waldensian Valleys. The work developed in the Valleys with modest success but a steady presence, so much so that from the United States the Advent Christian Church, a rival denomination, decided in turn to intervene by sending Pastor Miles Grant to Piedmont. The woman who shaped modern Seventh-day Adventists, Ellen G. White, arrived in Italy in 1885 and first went once again to Torre Pellice. The Salvation Army’s first national headquarters (after, to tell the truth, they had initially attempted to take root in Rome) was also established in Torre Pellice. In 1893, the center was moved from Torre Pellice to Turin, at Via Principe Amedeo 20.
In Turin, celebrated Protestant pastors such as John Nelson Darby, the true founder of modern Protestant fundamentalism, had already preached. The move of the Salvation Army and others to Turin was significant. When the “Waldensian myth” proved to be precisely a myth, and it turned out that the Waldensians were by no means ready to embrace new faiths quickly, for those who did not leave Italy the logical outlet was Turin. Thus, shortly after Ellen G. White’s passage to Italy, we find in Turin an Adventist congregation, deriving from that of Torre Pellice. We equally find in Turin some of the first Bible Students (future Jehovah’s Witnesses) outside the Waldensian Valleys, to say nothing of the presence of a good number of traditional Protestant denominations, favored in part by the particular political climate of the Piedmontese capital.
The “Waldensian myth” acted as a catalyst, along with the climate of search for alternatives to Catholicism, and the political conditions, to make Turin a singular city also from the point of view of non-Catholic groups of Christian origin. The first decades of the 20th century would take charge of considerably expanding these alternatives, with the arrival of new evangelical and Pentecostal groups. This third track, of course, has nothing to do with magic but shows the presence in the Turin of the 19th century of a favorable terrain for “alternative” spiritualities in general.
I insist: in the 19th century. The “somnambulists’ trial” of 1890 mentioned in the first article in this series was a signal from the authorities, which manifested that the political reasons—in essence, to give annoyance to the Catholic Church that opposed the government and the Risorgimento—which made Turin a city more open than others in Italy to alternative spirituality had disappeared. After 1890, in Turin certainly a significant presence of religions alternative to Catholicism, continued, which in more recent years also extended to Buddhism, but it cannot be said that, on the whole, this presence was greater than in Milan and Rome, or even in Naples, Bologna, Florence. Today the presence of a large community with magical and esoteric elements, Damanhur, should be noted, although it is not in Turin but in Valchiusella. Otherwise, Turin is a normal Italian and European metropolis, not “less” but neither “more” magical and rich in alternative spiritualities than others.
Why, then, does a widespread opinion think that this is not the case and Turin is the city of magic par excellence? We will try to answer this question in the fourth and final article in this series.
Massimo Introvigne (born June 14, 1955 in Rome) is an Italian sociologist of religions. He is the founder and managing director of the Center for Studies on New Religions (CESNUR), an international network of scholars who study new religious movements. Introvigne is the author of some 70 books and more than 100 articles in the field of sociology of religion. He was the main author of the Enciclopedia delle religioni in Italia (Encyclopedia of Religions in Italy). He is a member of the editorial board for the Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion and of the executive board of University of California Press’ Nova Religio. From January 5 to December 31, 2011, he has served as the “Representative on combating racism, xenophobia and discrimination, with a special focus on discrimination against Christians and members of other religions” of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). From 2012 to 2015 he served as chairperson of the Observatory of Religious Liberty, instituted by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in order to monitor problems of religious liberty on a worldwide scale.
