Franco-Provençal dialects are in current use among the dwellers of the Stura, Orco and Doire Baltée valleys. In the province (_circondario_) of Aosta the foreign language was current in over 70 villages (_communi_) at the time of the census of 1901. The province of Pignerol boasted of the two communi of Praly and San Martino di Perrero in which the same French dialects prevailed. The names of the communi of Beaulard, Bousson, Champlas du Col, Clavières, Fenils, Mollières, Rochemolles, Salbertrand, Sauze d’Oulx, Solomiac and Thures, all in the circondario of Suse, likewise indicate the presence of French-speaking inhabitants. It was computed that the language was used in the daily life of 18,958 families out of the 30,401 recorded in the census of that year. The average number of individuals to a family being 4.22 in those districts, it follows that about 80,000 subjects of the king of Italy speak a French dialect. In 1862, French was spoken by 76,736 inhabitants of the valley of Aosta. The importance of the language has hardly changed since then, as it has remained the medium of church, school and general culture. Nevertheless the use of French dialects is on the wane in the circondarii of Pignerol and Suse since the reconstitution of Italy. Planted between France and Italy, Piedmont became a connecting province in which the transition from one country to the other can be followed. Its rôle is analogous to that of Alsace-Lorraine on the confines of the French and the German languages. French taste and mode of living prevail in many sections of Piedmont. Turin strikes travelers proceeding from southern Italy as being in many respects a city of French customs. The French spoken in Italy also represents a transition speech between the langue d’oïl and the langue d’oc. It has close analogy with the patois spoken in French Switzerland, the Dauphiné, the Lyonnais and the valley of Aosta. All these regions once formed part of the kingdom of Burgundy. [Illustration: FIG. 21--Map showing some of the important localities of French speech in Northwestern Italy.] The French vernacular of thousands of Piedmontese is furthermore related to the cause of Protestantism, which has taken solid root in this mountain land in spite of the persecutions to which it had been formerly subjected. As used by the natives of the region the local dialect consists, more properly, of a modern form of an old langue d’oc dialect similar to the patois of various districts in the French High Alps. To the Protestant inhabitants of these mountain communities French has served as the only medium of intercourse with their co-religionists in Switzerland and France.