Torniella Mill

The mill in the village of Torniella is in excellent condition and is a 2-floor rectangular factory and an underground level, of which two drains supported by arches that were used to remove water needed to power the milling machinery. The building was used until the middle of the last century before it was abandoned; it was eventually restored and transformed into a small museum that conserves the memory of an industry that long characterized the Roccastrada area.

The rectangular building, built entirely in local stone, still preserves its main entrance door with a segmental arch. Underneath each of the arch’s springers, there are 5-sided stone blocks that served as a sort of base for the block above them. Non-identical and asymmetrical, the two blocks might indicate that the stone cutters made them directly at the construction site in order to adapt them to the arch. A similar building device, though missing in the two pointed arches below ground level supporting the drains that fed the water directly into a nearby trench, was identified in some similar arches found at the Roccatederighi and in the castle in Montemassi.

Another thing to mention is the rich colours on the kind of trachyte used to build the mill, apparently without any precise criteria, boasting reddish and orange hues that likely come from the large presence of iron deposits nearby, while the dominant colour of the trachyte used to construct the buildings in the centre of Torniella is a homogenous grey.

To the left of the mill’s main façade, on the southern side, you can find the conserved ruins of machinery used for iron working.