300 years later, a long walk home
Three centuries after a group of early Protestants fought back against exile, a descendant made his own “Glorious Return” to the Alpine valleys they called home. John Huth, Harvard’s Donner Professor of Science, wrapped up his two-stage mountain hike in August by retracing the steps of his Waldensian ancestors from their exile near Geneva 130 miles through the Alps to valleys along the Franco-Italian border, where other descendants still live today. The Waldensians were a Christian sect founded in 1173 by a merchant named Peter Waldo. They claimed direct descent from the apostles, fostered a personal interpretation of the Christian scriptures, and preached from a Bible translated into the local tongue. The group was excommunicated by the pope and persecuted by France and Savoy on and off for centuries, with the intensity of attacks increasing from the middle of the 1500s to the late 1600s. Huth, who traces his ancestry to a brother...