It’s Saturday morning, and we’ve put a busy week behind us.
For this last appointment of the first series of guided tours entitled Prato Cultural Fabric and organized by The Landladies Concierge Association of which I am a member.
We have made appointments at the amphitheater in Santa Lucia, North Prato, it is a bit cloudy, however participants are starting to arrive.
What are we doing today?
Not the usual tour, but an experience that will take us to the origins of the Prato area and its natural resources, which, skillfully shaped by human ingenuity, fueled the birth of the textile industry.
The amphitheater of Santa Lucia, is located along the right bank of the Bisenzio River, and this is where our tour begins together with Roberto Dei, president of the Association “Insieme per il Recupero della Gualchiera di Coiano” (Together for the Recovery of the Coiano fulling mill).
I will introduce the theme of the visit, which will be: everything begins with water, in this case we can say that everything begins with the Bisenzio River. From this place, in fact we begin to understand that this water flow has been of fundamental importance for the development of the area.
We learn that since the Middle Ages man has tried, with skillful works of ingenuity, to shape the territory in order to take greater advantage of it.
At Santa Lucia, straddling the right and left banks of the Bisenzio River, we find the Cavalciotto dam, Prato’s system of taking water from the river. From here the “Gorone” is channeled, which in the locality of “la Crocchia,” corresponding to today’s Piazza del Mercato Nuovo, branches off fifty kilometers of canals that cross the historic center of Prato and then flow into the Ombrone River.
The first mill fed by the Gorone, of which we have evidence, dates back to the beginning of the 11th century, however their presence was destined to grow, as evidenced by the statute of the Arte dei Mulini of the right bank of the Bisenzio, dated 1296, which lists 67 of them.
We then move on to visit the Abatoni residential center, whose name reminds us how what is now a residential and working complex was once the property of the Abbots of St. Augustine.
The interesting urban recovery plan revealed how the Abatoni mill was crossed by the waters of the Gorone and how the latter powered the horizontal wheels of the mill.
We learn, in fact, that in our imagination the mill is represented with a vertical wheel; in Italy, on the other hand, a horizontal wheel, also known as a ritrecine, is common.
We resume our journey to discover the rare pearl of Prato: the Coiano fulling mill, a significant testimony of a mill fed by the Bisenzio River starting in 1180 and owned by the Pieve di Santo Stefano, now the cathedral of Prato, and which remained in operation until the 1990s.
It was not until 1998 that the owner, Mr. Ricceri, sold the building to the City of Prato to begin a plan to restore it.
We cross Viale Galileo Galilei to follow the course of the Gorone and find ourselves in front of a partiio, which divides the canal in two, allowing it to feed the fulling mill and a mill not far away.
But what is a fulling mill? Together with Roberto Dei we discover that this machine for fulling pannilani was introduced in Italy by the Lombards starting in the 5th century. It was a machine consisting of two wheels, moved in this case by the water of the Gorone, with a shaft in the center that drove the hammers that beat on the fabric inside the troughs and with the addition of fulling earth and more anciently also with the addition of horse urine. This process made it possible to obtain a fabric that was firmer and softer to the hand and waterproofed.
The recovery of this jewel of industrial architecture is due to the Association “Insieme per il Recupero della Gualchiera di Coaino,” (Together for the Recovery of the Coiano fulling mill ) founded in 2016, whose volunteers have been working hard to return to the community a piece of Prato’s labor history that has its roots in the Middle Ages.
We enter the interior of the fulling mill and find inside a series of machines that were powered by leather belts, attached to the main shaft, driven by the hydraulic force of the waters of the Gorone.
Among these we note the fole, invented by a pioneer of the textile industry in the 19th century, we are talking about Giovan Battista Mazzoni, an entrepreneur who, after studying at the Sorbonne, returned to Prato with a remarkable wealth of knowledge that he did not hesitate to put into practice, building a first production nucleus in the former monastery of Sant’Anna in Giolica. The fole developed by Giovan Battista Mazzoni, were innovative and to the hammers for pounding fabrics, they replaced cylinders, the same principle is still used in today’s machinery.
The machinery of the second industrial revolution in the early post-war period was no longer sufficient to guarantee constant production, since still taking advantage of water power, they were obviously subject to the presence of water, which was less abundant in the summer period. To overcome this problem, the Ciolini family in 1936 implanted a synchronous motor with starting rheostat from the Brown Boveri house.
Our journey today was not far from home, but it took us on a sustainable route, making us travel back almost a thousand years.
