“Between Cordovado and Venchieredo, a mile from the two villages, there is a large and clear fountain that is also said to contain many cooling and healthy qualities in its water. But the nymph of the fountain did not trust solely in the virtues of the water to attract devotees and has surrounded herself with such a beautiful horizon of meadows, woods, and sky, and such a hospitable shade of alders and willows that it is truly a retreat worthy of Virgil's brush where she chose to make her abode.

Hidden and winding paths, the whisper of streams, gentle and mossy slopes, nothing is lacking all around. It is truly the mirror of a sorceress, that clear sky-blue water that, gushing imperceptibly from a bed of fine gravel, has risen to double in its bosom the image of such a picturesque and pastoral scene.

These are places that make one think of the inhabitants of Eden before the sin; and they also make us think without disgust of the sin now that we are no longer inhabitants of Eden.

There, around that fountain, the lovely girls of Cordovado, Venchieredo, and even Teglio, Fratta, Morsano, Cintello, and Bagnarola, and other surrounding villages, have customarily gathered for an immemorial time on festive evenings. And they stay there for a long time in songs, laughter, conversations, and picnics until their mothers, lovers, and the moon lead them back home. I didn't even want to tell you that along with the girls, the young men also gather there, because that was already to be imagined. But what I intend to note is that, accounting for the end of the year, I believe and affirm that people come to the fountain of Venchieredo more to fall in love than to drink; and besides, more wine than water is drunk there. It is known; in these cases, one must obey more the sausages and ham of the picnics than the superstition of the passing water.

As for me, I have been to that enchanting fountain many times; but once, only once, did I dare to profane with my hand the virgin crystal of its water. Hunting had led me there, broken by fatigue and burning with thirst; moreover, my flask of white wine would no longer shed a tear. If I were to return now, perhaps I would drink it in large gulps as if to rejuvenate myself…”

I Molini di Stalis are a complex of mills recently restored thanks to a recovery intervention promoted by the Comune di Gruaro and the Provinces of Venice and Pordenone. They are located on the banks and on an island in the middle of the Lemene River, near an ancient ford.

I Molini di Stalis, which are situated exactly on the border between Friuli Venezia Giulia and Veneto, along the course of the Lemene River, have a history closely linked to that of the nearby Abbazia di Santa Maria di Sesto. The fundamental date for this location is 1182, when Pope Lucius III issued a Bull extending papal protection over the Benedictines of Sesto and confirming the privileges of the ancient Abbey. This document also mentions Vincaretum cum curte and Staules cum curte.

But what was a curtis? It indicated an organization of people and means with a specific economic function. In our case, the etymology of the term Stalis – which evidently means "stable" – helps us understand that there were shelters for animals within a larger property. The lordship of the Abbey over Stalis was then confirmed by Pope Gregory IX in 1236 and later by a favorable sentence to Abbot Ermanno in 1298.

As you can see, up to this point the documents do not mention any mill, which is the main functional and landscape feature of this beautiful place.

When did mills generally originate? The water mill spread in Europe after the year 1000; if before energy was derived from forests, now it moved along watercourses. In the 13th century, the hydraulic saw was invented.

If this also happened in our territories, then one can hypothesize an immediate interest from the Abbots towards a location and a mill included in their privileges. The fact remains that the first documents that certainly attest to the existence of the Mills date back to 1432, when the patriarchal state had already been incorporated into the Serenissima Repubblica di Venezia and Abbot of Sesto was Tommaso de’ Savioli, the last of the residential abbots. Other documents concerning Stalis date back to:

- 1522, and attest to the obligation of the inhabitants of Bagnara (a hamlet of the current municipality of Gruaro) to go and grind their grains at Stalis;

- 1583, and consist of a seven-year lease contract for the mill, including stables, saw, millstones, pestles, and fishpond;

- 1656, and it is an annona survey that records, in Stalis, the presence of 21 men, 15 women, 6 boys, and 8 girls, for a total of 50 people;

- 1688, when two families appear linked to the subsequent history of the mill: the Portogruaresi Tasca as owners and the Brussolo as millers.

The last fundamental document that concludes the oldest history of the site is the Napoleonic Cadastre, when the Mills were aggregated to the territory of the Comune di Gruaro, and thus definitively separated from Venchiaredo.

In the 1800s and 1900s, agriculture, and therefore the landscape, underwent significant transformations: the art of milling suffered an irreversible decline.

From 1810 is the description in the aforementioned Napoleonic cadastre, which attests to the presence of a four-wheel mill, faced, on the right side of the river, by a house, a spinning mill, and a saw. In 1839, based on an Austrian survey, the mill appears divided into two parts: a water grain mill and a grain mill with a barley pestle. On the right bank, we find two farmhouses and a water-powered lumber saw.

We quickly move into the mid-1900s, when work activity continued uninterrupted until the start of World War II. At the end of the conflict, the mills resumed activity, mainly grinding corn.

The mill on the island operated until around 1960.

Information taken from “I mulini di Stalis” publication edited by the Comune di Gruaro with texts by Vincenzo Gobbo, Eugenio Marin, Clelia Munciguerra, Luca Vendrame, 2001.

Ippolito Nievo was born in Padua in the Mocenigo-Querini palace, the firstborn of Antonio and Adele Marin, daughter of the Friulian countess Ippolita di Colloredo and the Venetian patrician Carlo Marin.

The Marin family owns the fief of Monte Albano, where the castle of Colloredo stands, halfway between Tricesimo and San Daniele, places frequented in Ippolito's childhood when, in 1837, his father was transferred from Soave to the court of Udine.

In 1841 Ippolito was enrolled in the college of the Sant’Anastasia seminary in Verona as an internal boarder, but not bearing the discipline, from 1843 he attended the Gymnasium as an external student. His solitude was alleviated by visits from his grandfather Carlo, a cultured man, friend of Pindemonte and lover of literature, who became, due to the distance of his parents, the reference figure to whom he dedicated the notebook of his Poetici componimenti fatti l’anno 1846-1847, simple school poems in a classicist style.

When Alessandro Nievo died in 1843, the firstborn Antonio, Ippolito's father, inherited the family villa with agricultural lands in Fossato, a hamlet of the municipality of Rodigo (MN), and the Nievo palace in Mantua with its furnishings, art collections, and the rich library. The father took residence there also following his transfer in 1847 to the court of nearby Sabbioneta, and Ippolito returned to the family in Mantua, a city where his grandfather Carlo Marin also went to settle, to spend his retirement years. Here he continued his studies at the Liceo Virgilio, alongside Attilio Magri (1830-1898) who, in love with Orsola Ferrari, frequented her house and introduced Ippolito there, where he met the older sister, Matilde (1830-1868), his first love. In 1848 the young Ippolito, fascinated by the democratic program of Mazzini and Cattaneo, participated in the failed insurrection of Mantua. Prudently, he continued his studies in Cremona with his friend Attilio Magri and, the following year, the family deemed it appropriate for him to leave Lombardy for some time and moved to Tuscany, first to Florence and then to Pisa.

Here he came into contact with the exponents of the democratic party of Guerrazzi: Tuscany was also shaken by the Risorgimento movements and perhaps Ippolito participated in Livorno in the movement of May 10, 1849, against the Austrians, who intervened to favor the return of the Grand Duke Leopold who had fled four months earlier from Florence. Returning in September to Mantua, he continued his studies in Cremona, where in August 1850 he obtained his high school diploma. In the fall he enrolled in the Faculty of Law at the University of Pavia and maintained continuous correspondence with Matilde Ferrari: the 69 letters written from 1850 to early 1851, rather than being a sincere and spontaneous communication of a distant lover, appear dictated by an intimate necessity of lyrical expression and written with an eye on literary canons, thus ending up being of interest «especially for the way in which the sentimental material, sometimes raised to tones of passionate emphasis, is shaped in formulas of clear literary matrix, almost defining itself in an autonomous sequence of an epistolary novel, open to the suggestions that came from the consecrated models of the genre, from Foscolo's Ortis and Rousseau's Nouvelle Heloïse».

In early 1851, the relationship ended and against her, he wrote a short novel, Antiafrodisiaco per l’amor platonico. In January 1852 he began working as a publicist in the Brescia daily La Sferza. At the end of the year, he enrolled at the University of Padua, reopened by the Austrian government after the liberal agitations, and, often traveling to Friuli, collaborated with the magazine L’Alchimista Friulano, where he also published poems that, collected in a volume, were published in 1854 by the publisher Vendrame of Udine: a second collection was published the following year. In 1855, disappointed by the Italian political situation, the writer retired to Colloredo di Montalbano, where he actively dedicated himself to literary production, outlining in his mind what would be his masterpiece, Le confessioni d’un italiano. Meanwhile, he continued his activity as a publicist and approached Milanese militant journalism by collaborating with the weekly Il Caffè. In 1856, due to a story titled L’Avvocatino published in the Milanese paper Il Panorama universale, he was accused of insulting the Austrian imperial guards and underwent a trial in which he defended himself. This was the occasion to spend long periods in Milan where he had the opportunity to participate in the stimulating literary and political debates that took place and to appreciate the lively cultural climate of that city. Ippolito Nievo during that period began a relationship with Bice Melzi, wife of his cousin Carlo Gobio; he was attached to her until his death, addressing numerous letters to her during the intense period of the Garibaldian enterprises.

Between 1857 and 1858 Nievo, returned to Colloredo, intensely dedicated himself to writing his great novel Le confessioni d’un italiano which would be published posthumously in 1867 by the publisher Le Monnier with the revised title Le confessioni di un ottuagenario. The events of 1859 and 1860 intensified his journalistic activity and prompted his first two political essays, the pamphlet Venezia e la libertà d’Italia, inspired by the city's failure to be liberated, and the Frammento sulla rivoluzione nazionale. He also dedicated himself to writing a new novel, Il pescatore di anime, destined to remain unfinished. In 1859 he was among Garibaldi's Cacciatori delle Alpi and the following year he participated in the Expedition of the Thousand. Joining the Garibaldian troops on May 5, 1860, he set sail from Quarto aboard the Lombardo along with Nino Bixio and Cesare Abba. Distinguished at Calatafimi and Palermo, he was appointed “Intendente di prima classe” of the Expedition of the Thousand with administrative duties, becoming the deputy of Giovanni Acerbi. He was also an attentive chronicler of the expedition (Diario della spedizione dal 5 al 28 maggio e Lettere garibaldine). Having been tasked with bringing back the administrative documents of the expedition from Sicily, he met his death during the navigation from Palermo to Naples, on the night between March 4 and 5, 1861, in the shipwreck of the steamer Ercole off the Sorrento coast in view of the Gulf of Naples. In the shipwreck, all the people on board perished and neither wreckage nor bodies were returned by the sea. The mysterious circumstances of the shipwreck fueled hypotheses of a political conspiracy. In the novel Il prato in fondo al mare published by Mondadori in 1974, authored by his great-grandson Stanislao Nievo, the dramatic event is represented as “a suspected Italian State massacre, matured by the Right and decided by the Piedmontese power to liquidate the Garibaldian Left: “massacre” with which the history of united Italy would have begun”. In subsequent publications, other hypotheses have been advanced regarding the origin of the possible attack, such as the role played by international, particularly English, funding aimed at favoring the Expedition of the Thousand. Among the works that have dealt with it are La tragica morte di Ippolito Nievo. Il naufragio doloso del piroscafo «Ercole» by Cesaremaria Glori, Il misterioso caso di Ippolito Nievo by Rino Cammilleri, and Il cimitero di Praga by Umberto Eco.