Story of The Mill

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The Mill of Porta di Sotto is in Mondaino, next to the old Porta Montanara, the great defensive wall of the malatestian castle. It’s famous for his history of battles and sieges. The castle has three floors, towers, epic elegant arches, oil and grain millstones, a well, an oven and many intersting architectures. It also has three large holes of witch have planted large nails for secure the pipes, wood and straw coverings, cheese and many other things. The history of Mondaino is a story of battles and sieges. People had to buildtmany large walls of protection, fortified by thirteen towers and an indistructable fortress. The peak periods were the middle ages and the renaissance, when people like Ferrantino, Malatestiano and especially Sigismondo Pandolfo made it a stronghold of their territorial expansion policy. In this strategic expansion plan, they fight many stronger enemy like the Church of Rome and expecially the Ghibellines, who sided with the emperor of Germany. The most violent clash, however, it’s that one against the people of Urbino; thanx to Federico Da Montefeltro, at last they win the battle. Overcome the resistence of the defenders, nothing in the castle was saved from the looting of the victorious troops. We can easily consider the birth of the Porta di Sotto Pitt in those terrible years under, when people tried to save the food stocks in large holes dug in the dry sandstone.Historical records in Mondaino quotes about:

[…fovea in platea publica…] (anno 1392)
[…in alia fovea polita in dicto castro settem sestaria ordey…] (anno 1468)
Out of danger, after the disgrace of defeat, people went do recover the buried stocks and found a very nice surprise: not only certain foods were preserved perfectly, but others had so changed their taste characteristics. So it was natural to repeat the experiment in the following centuries.