The activity of the mill has stopped with the flood of November 4, 1966.
Now Lucia and Eugenio Fantappié have transformed the mill into a museum, keeping all the old equipment and serving as a guide for schools and groups, to provide practical demonstrations of milling wheat, obtained with the single hydraulic force of the river Arno.
The feeding of the mill is ensured by the adjoining mill-race, once called “Nannoni's mill-race”, for Nannoni was a renter of the late XVI century when the owner of the mill was the baron Luigi del Nero, whose family bought it in 1561 for 240 coins.
Fantappié family buys the mill of Ellera in 1895 and still owns.
In 1935 the mill, made of three millstones, has a cheesecloth moved by hydraulic force and a daily production of 10 tons of flour.
But the oldest trace of the mill dates back to 1350, mentioned by the estimate of the Florentine Republic of that year.
At the mill of Ellera eight small boats of sand-diggers have been “saved by water”.
The passion of Marco Castaldi, inheriting the ability of the caulkers' art (the old craft of stopping with tow the junctures of small boats), has brought new life to small boats that every year, in September, are on show during the traditional feast of “Rificolona”, parading along the mill-stream with the “allegorical water wagons”.
