La Terra delle Meraviglie - Agriturismi, Bed&Breakfast, Hotel, Campeggi, Residences | Marche Ascoli Piceno | Sibillini Gran Sasso-Laga

Ernesto The miller  

But in his spare time Ernesto flees the city, traffic, office, the queues in offices, the full shopping trolleys in the shopping centres.  He goes on a long trip that takes him back in time and in half an hour he arrives in the town that existed “once upon a time”, called Piedicava.

In Piedicava he changes and becomes Ernesto the miller.

What is most remarkable is that Ernesto does not change to attract visitors: the truth is he is a miller and has a genuine water mill that still works, full of old equipment that is more ingenious than the household appliances my mother has, stranger than my father's tools and even more curious and fascinating than my technological games.

Ernesto use these devices to fix the millstones and replace damaged parts: he disassembles and assembles them as if they were Lego bricks, using the force of the water, the hardness of stone and the flexibility of wood to operate his mill and grind each type of grain with the same naturalness that my mother has when she grinds and mixes with her kitchen mixer, strange mixtures that we sometimes have to eat too.

The most extraordinary thing is that it seems as if Ernesto has never done anything else in his life. Perhaps he learned to walk on these loose boards loose and it was here he began to know the world, poking about among the sacks of grain, wooden crates and friendly mice.  Surely on many evenings he fell asleep in his grandfather’s strong arms, dreaming of mysterious strangers who came from who knows where with their precious cargo of golden seeds.  In the morning, opening his eyes, he would hear the splashing of water and the sound of the millstones at work at sunrise.  Swept away by a sweet, intense perfume, he would get up to enjoy his grandmother’s freshly baked biscuits.  Once dressed, he would wash his face in the basin, shivering at the water’s coldness.

Certainly, once the holidays were over, he would return to normal town life and his schoolboy occupations: school, friends, religious holidays, shopping in the city from time to time.

Growing up, visits to the mill would become less frequent and after the death of his grandfather that little dreamer moved to a distant village.  Now he is a man like any other: he has a wife, children, a nice modern house, a normal job and a car….But in his free time this man goes to the village that existed “once upon a time” and that curious, dreaming child returns.  Now that child is a man and has repaired his grandfather’s old mill.  How I would have liked it if my grandfather, instead of leaving us the house at the seaside, had left us a magical place like Ernesto’s mill!