Phoebe was successfully shown in many places in England by our Com-
mittee in 1927, but returning back to Italy pastor Bosio risked going to prison.
Another copy was sent to the US with great caution. Its beginning and end-
ing were changed, it passed through different hands, underwent brutal cuts
and the reels were at various times lost and found. Eventually it disappeared
until it was ‘found’ at the bottom of a cupboard of the American Waldensian
Society in 1981. Faithful for Centuries/Phoebe was eventually shown in 1982
in the Church of Torre Pellice, so crammed that one could hardly breathe. The
footage of the contemporary congregations had all been cut and lost, apart
from a few, and Riesi was one of them. My father was delighted at seeing his
mother and aunts (all teachers in the Waldensian schools) and dozens and
dozens of Sunday School children hap-
pily singing away.
At the time of the shooting of the film,
the pastor of Riesi was Arturo Mingardi.
As a young ex-Modernist priest, in tur-
moil one Sunday evening he had walked
past the beautiful church in piazza Cavour
in Rome that in those days was opened for
‘Services of Evangelisation’. The great mu-
sic and the persuasive words captivated
him and he went in. He was warmly wel-
comed … so much so that he decided to
attend the church, becoming a Waldensian
and eventually studying Theology at the
Faculty round the corner. Once ordained,
he asked to be sent where nobody wanted
Chiesa Valdese (by Bonci & Rudelli,
to go. He chose Riesi, which had a flour-
1914), Piazza Cavour, Rome.
ishing and enthusiastic congregation, but
where the living conditions had cost vari-
ous ministers, particularly their families,
their health and even their lives. Malaria,
cholera, smallpox and other diseases now
associated with developing countries
were more or less routine. Riesi was a
poor town of miners and peasants with
a small, but active, middle class of Liber-
als and Free Masons. Since Garibaldi’s
landing in Sicily, Waldensian preachers
and distributors of Bibles and Protestant
literature had visited most parts of the
island, which was superstitious and more
pagan than Christian. In Riesi, though, it
Pastor Mingardi with Sunday
was the Liberal Mayor who, annoyed with
School children.
3