30. Old Mill Stream

One of the things I liked best about Il Poggio was that it was a  place with a lot of  history.

What is old to an American just can't be as old as the old things here in Italy and I really liked that fact.

For example I was scouting out the neighborhood and followed a path behind the Il Poggio buildings and into the countryside. A couple of hundred yards along this woodsy path I came to a babbling brook issuing from a cavern in a hill.

I went into the darkish cavern and discovered that it was  made with mostly collapsed old brick arches with a floor of dressed stones--and buried in the sandy clay bed of the stream was a big millstone--which weighed, I guess, several hundred pounds.

What the heck--this hillside must be part of an old dam. And this millstone must at one time have been part of a regular mill--a flour mill maybe before this country was all turned  into vineyards.

When I asked Elisabetta about it she said that Il Poggio had at one time been a monastery and the monks had dammed the stream in the valley to produce water power for a mill!

This was all long ago. The mill had been ruined for years--maybe hundreds of years--and all that was left was the partially collapsed cavern and the half buried old millstones.

Lovers sometimes made the cavern a romantic  trysting place these days. She said if you looked you could see places where candles had burned on long summer nights down by the old mill stream.

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