Standard:

-The Valdese getto p.117 -Foreigners p.119 -Livorno p.120 -Venice p.123 -Notes p.125

According to a 1649 account, when the Waldensian pastor Jacques Gilles had an audience with Victor Amadeus I, he mentioned the "Privilege"” and "Concessions" granted by the Most Serene Dukes of Savoy to their Protestant subjects. The Duke interrupted him, saying that he should not use those terms but instead the word "tolerances" ("tolleranze”). He explained, "a privilege is one thing, and toleration is another; you tolerate gambling and whores […] and I hold this religion [of the Waldenses] in the same way."

This exchange between the pastor and the duke captures emblematically the concepts of toleration and tolerance in early modern times. As Benjamin Kaplan masterfully pointed out in his study on the practices of coexistence between different confessions in early modern Europe, the social practice that governed the coexistence of people of different faiths ("toleration") had nothing to do with the principles of mutual acceptance and of positive consideration of differences that, since the Enlightenment, we associate with the term "tolerance."