I came to Italy with a pitch half-written in my head, and I lost faith in it inside of a week.
The pitch was about Genoa. Silvia Salis, the former Olympic hammer thrower who took the city from the Italian right last year and now gets described, in the liberal press at least, as the woman who might unseat Giorgia Meloni.1 The argument I wanted to make was simplistic. Los Angeles hides behind its sanctuary status, built up since Special Order 40 in 1979 and finally codified in a 2024 city ordinance, the way you pull a jacket over your head in the rain. Salis does the opposite. She throws a techno rave in the central piazza the same year Meloni’s government bans them. She puts a wage floor in the city’s contracts. She opens a municipal office for queer Genoese and registers the children of same-sex couples the national government would rather pretend do not exist. Stop hiding, I want to tell our side. Pick up the hammer and throw.
Then my fiancée brought me north to Torre Pellice, where she grew up, and the valley took the argument apart.
You can stand in the middle of this place and not realize where you are. It looks like any small mountain town: one main street, a handful of shops with old family names over the doors, kitchen gardens running back toward the tree line. In summer the forested slopes fill with hikers and mountain bikers. But Torre Pellice is the capital of a people who spent the better part of four centuries being hunted. The Waldensians began in the twelfth century as the poor of Lyon, were excommunicated and driven underground, and survived as a Protestant minority in exactly one corner of Italy: these valleys, narrow, defensible, easy to disappear into.2 Edmondo De Amicis, passing through in the next century, called Torre Pellice the little Italian Geneva and the valley above it a Waldensian Thermopylae.
But the history here is not a story of hiding. In 1686 the Duke of Savoy offered them the choice every minority is eventually offered: assimilate, leave, or die. Most left. Three years later about nine hundred of them marched back from Switzerland, armed, and took the valleys again by force. They called it the Glorious Return, and before the fighting they swore an oath to hold together until every valley was reclaimed. Full civil rights did not arrive until 1848, more than a century and a half later. And when fascism came in the next century, these same valleys became one of the most active centers of the armed Resistance, so much so that in February 1945 the Germans bombed Torre Pellice, Bobbio Pellice, Villar Pellice, and Prali, the valleys’ towns, from the air.3
Here is what I had gotten wrong. I assumed sanctuary and resistance could not share the same ground, that you lose your shield when you pick up the hammer. But the valley was always both at once. Hiding was how a hunted people stayed alive long enough to return and fight. We treat resistance as a threat to the sanctuary; the valley says the reverse. The sanctuary exists because the danger is already there, only obscured. Keeping your head down does not avoid the fight. It only hides that the fight has already begun.
Which brought me back to Salis with more discerning eyes. Read without the romance, she is not a battering ram against the Italian Right. The Italian Left is right to be wary of her; she is a growth-first pragmatist whom the establishment press is grooming precisely because she has no socialist past to defend. And the move I most admired, the civil registrations, is the fragile one. When the mayor of Milan tried the same thing, the national interior ministry sent a letter, and he was forced to stop. A city can defy a hostile national government right up until that government decides to notice. The rave was real and the wage floor is real, but one was counter-programming and the other is a standard Los Angeles already exceeds, for now.
So the lesson I am taking home is not the one I packed. We have already seen what federal power does to a sanctuary that is only paperwork, and worse, what our own police do beside it. In June 2025, immigrant rights advocates watched LAPD officers hold the perimeter near downtown while federal agents loaded local workers into unmarked vehicles, the families too afraid to come for them until the police had gone.4 The chief calls it crowd control. Our ordinance turned out to have been a wish, not a shield. The question the valley puts to us is what kind of sanctuary we are building: the kind that files an ordinance and hopes Washington looks away, or the kind that keeps people fed and housed and organized and alive.
That infrastructure is not built in City Hall. It is built in block-by-block tenant unions that refuse evictions, mutual defense networks that protect their neighbors, and labor coalitions ready to grind the city to a halt when the raids redouble. We build the infrastructure of survival first, so that there is a community left to make the return.
The Waldensians did not survive because they hid well. They survived because the place they hid became the place they fought back from. That is the only sanctuary worth the name. Los Angeles has the paperwork. It does not yet have the valley.
The profile that prompted this note: “Former Olympic Hammer Thrower Emerges as Italian Left’s Anti-Meloni,” Politico Europe, April 2026. For the skeptical reading I lean on here, see E. A. Halevi, “Italy’s Ruling Class Has Found Its Plan B,” Jacobin, May 2026.
"Short History of the Waldensian Church," Casa Valdese, Torre Pellice. De Amicis described Torre Pellice as "the little Italian Geneva" and the Angrogna valley as a "Waldensian Thermopylae" in his late nineteenth-century travel writing.
"Fascism and the Waldensians, 1922–1945," American Waldensian Society. The aerial bombing of Torre Pellice, Bobbio Pellice, Villar Pellice, and Prali is dated to February 1945.
Christopher Damien, “After a Canceled Presentation, Immigrant Rights Advocates Finally Get Their Day Before the Police Commission,” The LA Local, May 19, 2026.