Strength and beauty

Strength and beauty of water in its flow and fall. The Velino Waterfall is a symbol of Umbria and attracts travellers from all over the world. Just a short distance from Via Flaminia, along one of the Grand Tour’s classic routes, it has been painted, sketched, engraved, described, lauded. Its appeal is still very much alive, although the spectacular Velino Waterfall can only be visited on specific days and times because the needs of its hydroelectric plant alternate with those of tourists.
Water has always been an important economic resource, crucial to manufacturing. In the past it was used to cool and clean, but its power was also frequently used to drive the machines employed to work paper and wool, mills, and for tanning and steel plants, especially where it naturally or artificially falls very rapidly. Maps also record this, frequently featuring drawings of mills, often on small river branches, and also changes in the courses of rivers and streams to make them functional to manufacturing needs.
In Gubbio the course of the Camignano stream was diverted to the town centre to facilitate wool cloth washing.
In 1254, the River Topino, which passed through Foligno town, was diverted by the people of Perugia during their siege of the town. When the battle ended, however, the river’s previous course was to some extent restored for the purposes of leather tanning and to ensure the town’s many mills had the water power they needed.
The Pale paper mills depicted in an 18th century landscape by Forrester required the waters of the Menotre valley and a branch of the Topino River. Historian Jacobilli reminds us that there were a grand total of 12 paper mills in Pale, Belfiore and Carpineto and 13 fulling mills for cloth working in Vescia, Belfiore, Rasiglia and Casenove in the 17th century, once again in the Menotre valley.
The spectacular Velino falls can be admired in the landscapes painted and engraved by artists of the past and on show here, including the work of Philipp Hackert, Wilhelm Friederich Gmelin and William Linton. The falls are not just beautiful but also enormously powerful, a power which was the basis of the birth and survival of a great many industrial activities in the Terni valley. In fact the Terni steel plant is bound up with the presence and power of the area’s waters. A 1898 monograph by Società degli Alti Forni Fonderie ed Acciaierie di Terni shows the extent to which the presence and power of the Velino and Nera rivers were fundamental to the origins and development of this steel firm and this spectacular waterfall in particular.