All the places named are in the Valley of Luserna, and the object was a wholesale shifting of the Protestants of that valley out of nine of its communes and their concentration into five higher up.

In vain were there remonstrances at Turin from those immediately concerned.

On the 17th of April, 1655, the Marquis di Pianezza entered the doomed region with a body of troops, mainly Piedmontese, but with French and Irish among them.
There was resistance, fighting, burning, pillaging, flight to the mountains, and chasing and murdering for eight days, Saturday, April 24, being the climax.

The names of about three hundred of those murdered individually are on record, with the ways of the deaths of many of them.

Women were ripped open, or carried about impaled on spikes; men, women, and children, were flung from precipices, hacked, tortured, roasted alive; the heads of some of the dead were boiled and the brains eaten; there are forty printed pages, and twenty-six ghastly engravings, by way of Protestant tradition of the ascertained variety of the devilry.