The Art of Milling in Calabria - Italy: History, Architecture, Construction Systems of Some Hydraulic Factories

The essay proposes knowledge of some examples of milling architecture present in Calabria between the 17th and 20th centuries, highlighting its architectural and construction peculiarities. The mills have represented a central activity in the regional economy and still constitute significant prototypes of industrial archaeology. The study aims to highlight the compositional-constructive panorama of the artefacts, aiming to trace the typological evolution, the phases of formation and transformation, the symbolic-formal, distributional-functional, material-constructive variations. The paper starts from considering the basic type to focus on the growth of this in more complex structures up to the present day with the milling industries. The traced panorama has highlighted a large quantity of mills throughout the entire Calabrian territory which are currently in a state of abandonment and strong degradation but significant in their architectural and construction specificities. The intent was to trace the singularities and stimulate conservation and redevelopment actions of the artefacts to reconvert the disused mills to new activities and/or reinsert them into the entire production cycle to return milling architecture and traditions to contemporary communities.