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Valdese TempleDuring the 18th century the little foreign protestant colony, settled down in Turin in order to work as traders and soldiers, had the possibility to exercise their own worship under the protection of the British Legacy, which had resident chaplains or received isolated visits from the Valdese ministers coming from the Valleys, although the protests of the clergy and from part of the population of Turin who badly saw the presence of competitors in business coming from a foreign country. Only in 1825 the minister plenipotentiary of the king of Prussia in the Savoy court, count Waldburg-Truchsess, obtained by the Piedmontese government the permit to fund a chapel of the protestant legacies (Prussian, English and Dutch) placed in their Embassy, first in via dell'Ospedale and from 1848 in Palazzo Bellora between via della Meridiana and viale del Re, now via Carlo Alberto and corso Vittorio Emanuele II. The ministers of the legacies asked to the Valdese Table the sending of a minister in the Valleys who could fulfil the tasks of a chaplain: Jean Pierre Bonjour from 1827 to 1832 and Amedée Bert from 1832 to 1849, when the Valdese church was constituted, had this job. The chapel was reserved exclusively to the diplomat personnel, to foreigners and to Valdese resident in the city and it was formally interdicted to Catholics.  Valdese Temple The Lettere Patenti of February 17th, 1848, with which the king Carlo Alberto granted to the Valdese civil and political rights, underlying only that the exercise worship different from the Catholic one were just tolerated, led to feelings of great gratitude and enthusiasm, mainly among the members of the Evangelic community of Turin, the following steps were the request of the aggregation of the community to the Valdese church, and this fusion happened with plenty of discussions and the decision to build a temple in a central area of the city. The first request to obtain a public worship place proposed by the Valdese were not taken into consideration by the government, and only at the end of 1850 the king Vittorio Emanuele II gave the consent to the purchase of a land and to the building of a temple in the neighbourhood called the Meridiana, near the Valentino. The English Anglican general Charles Beckwith and Valdese industrialist Joseph Malan had the task to realize the project, both by generously contributing to the fund raising and by following the works; the project was assigned to the architect Luigi Formento and the realization to the entrepreneur of Biella Eugenio Gastaldi. They were also informing punctually the Table of the progress of the works. On October 29th, 1851 the first stone of the building was posed, with a ceremony in which the diplomatic service, the protestant community the members of the Valdese Table and several ministers of the Valleys participated in and two years later, on December 15th, 1853, the temple was inaugurated. The Valdese temple is an unusual building in the survey of the Turinese eclectics, where two high polygonal towers, ended with pinnacles, clench a façade divided horizontally in two parts by a terracotta frame: on the high part there are a rose window and a window of seven lights, on the low part a portal with a deep splay. The tower motif with the pinnacle is reprised on the sides, in a minor dimension, until it becomes a series of squat buttresses. Information: |