About
The last operating shipyard in Italy, which was previously common along major rivers throughout all of Europe
The Po river, which flows through the whole width of northern Italy, has long been one of the country's most vital waterways. For centuries, ship mills, a type of floating water mill used for grinding grains, were once a common sight along its banks. In 1902, the first (and last) official Italian census about ship mills in the Po river found that there were 266. Less than fifty years later, in 1945, Allied bombings at the end of World War II destroyed the last surviving ship mill on the river.
