A very interesting object from a historical point of view for the Valle dei Mulini.
Guilty or innocent, can an object be accused of having caused the closure of many water mills in central and southern Italy, including those in our valley?
This thing is a mechanical rev counter with 5 decimal totalizers and was made compulsory by the Milling Law of 1868, when the unitary government forced the installation of this counter to tax the milling activity.
Against any sense of logic it counted the revolutions of the mill. It was though to measure in this way the quantity of wheat producted by each mill.
However, the application of this law and the use of the rev counter did not consider neither the size of the mills nor their millstones.
It would have been simple to consider that, for the same number of revolutions of the wheel, a mill with a large millstone could produce more than a smaller one, because the size (and consequently the production capacity) of a water mill was depending on the "water" energy that made it work.
It is clear that the few rivers and streams present in central and southern Italy are not remotely comparable to those present in the north of the country, where the mills were much larger and with greater production capacity.
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