Resumen de Altri castelli. I mulini fortificati delle Marche
Lucia Serafini, Giorgia Mercorell
In the multitude of castles that characterize the Mediterranean area - walled villages, towers, fortresses, forts - a prominent place is occupied by a singular type of productive buildings, often of medieval layout, that resorted to munition structures to secure themselves from attacks and raids along the rivers or routes to which they were strategically located. These are hydraulic mills that are widespread in Italy but in some regions have found interesting declinations, certainly linked to the historical events of individual territories as well as to their political and economic circumstances. In Le Marche, a region in the center of the peninsula, almost 10 percent of the approximately 200 hydraulic mills surveyed to date correspond to real fortified factories, although diminished in their formal and material culture by time and abandonment to the point of often being reduced to the state of ruins. Taking advantage of first-hand documentation, especially in terms of graphic surveys attentive to the material culture of individual buildings and the extraordinary landscape context in which they are located, the present contribution aims to bring new arguments to bear on a heritage largely neglected by official historiography. The opportunity is valuable not only to explore in depth the conjugation between the characters proper to castles and those of protoindustrial productive buildings such as watermills, but also to prefigure a recovery that is not only desirable but also possible.
