The watermills of Barga – book presentation

Normally a book presentation in Barga does not exactly bring with it large crowds but this morning at the Palazzo Pancrazi in Barga Vecchia it was standing room only with people spilling out of the building into the piazza all trying to get a glimpse of what was going on.  What actually was happening was the culmination of six years work for the father and son team of Emilio and Raffaello Lammari and the presentation of their book -”I mulini ad acqua nel territorio di Barga”. What started out as originally a school project for Raffaello concerning a water mill in Barga blossomed into a research occupying both  into all of the water mills in the territory of Barga. The pair then went on to painstakingly document in images and text every known mill in the area and researched all the people who had built and worked in them. Almost all are now disused and many reduced to ruins since they stopped working in the late 50′s and early 60′s but thanks to Emilio and Raffaello, they are no longer lost to the community as this book manages to recreate and show some of the back breaking work and also some of the poetry that went into this now lost profession.

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“I mulini ad acqua nel territorio di Barga” di Emilio e Raffaello Lammari,

Click on the link below to hear the opening speeches at the presentation this morning in Palazzo Pancrazi

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