Today the Valle dei Mulini di Gragnano and other similar places tell us about a distant past but there are few who fully understand the great value they had for our predecessors.
The water mills represented an innovation that served to greatly raise the standard of living of populations struggling with many problems.
The grinding of grain by means of heavy overlapping limestone stones was a practice known for thousands of years, but the effort was a lot as compared to modest quantities producted, which were naturally intended for the rich and the wealthier class of the population.
However, when, thanks to water mills, it was possible to automate the milling process, it was possible to distribute it even to the less wealthy sections of the population.
Mills were therefore great inventions that contributed to human progress more than others in the following centuries.
They allowed millions of people to be fed more substantially. People who previously almost always ate "leaves" were also able to eat cereals and this certainly contributed to a better standard of living.
For this we should be indebted to our predecessors who managed to create complex hydraulic systems in order to improve their quality of life even where nature was not so benevolent.
In particular, in Southern Italy, grinding systems were created that still fascinate today since one cannot understand how it was possible to do them without the equipment we have today.