La Segheria veneziana di Prestine

In the stone hamlet of Prestine stands the Razèga, a sawmill of probable medieval origin. Destroyed by flood, rebuilt and later converted to electric power, it is the last surviving sawmill in the ecomuseum territory and still belongs to the society of the village's founding families.

Why it matters

Val Camonica once ran on water, and sawmills were as much a part of that world as iron hammers. Surviving from that world is the Segheria veneziana di Prestine, called the Razèga in dialect: a building the Comune judges to be probably of medieval origin, and the only sawmill left anywhere within territory administered by Ecomuseo del Vaso Re e della Valle dei Magli. Its story gathers everything that defines the valley's industrial past in one building — medieval engineering, a catastrophic seventeenth-century flood, eighteenth-century rebuilding, communal ownership by the village's old families and, from 1950, electric power. It stands in the borgo of Prestine, which kept political independence for centuries before merging with Bienno in 2016, and the hamlet retains a history distinct from that of Bienno.

What to notice

The sawmill was driven by water from the Valle delle Valli torrent beside the building; its channel and drop carried the stream onto the wooden machinery, while the low hall was built around the saw frame. The Comune's ownership note is itself an artefact: the sawmill belongs to the societa antichi originari, the society of Prestine's ancient original families, an institution of collective property that has outlived the Republic of Venice that gave the sawmill its Venetian name. The surviving equipment preserves the sequence of work — log, clamp, blade and plank — and the last sawyer of the modern era is remembered by name: Giacomo Monchieri, the final Rasegot, who managed the mill from 1981. The sawmill demonstrates how systematically this valley mechanised timber alongside iron.

Context and history

The building’s documented history is marked by repeated change. The flood of 1634 — the same Grigna flood that broke the Vaso Re canal in Bienno and badly damaged the village mill — destroyed the sawmill, and it was rebuilt in 1777, the date the municipality records as the construction of the present structure. From 1950 it ran on electric energy rather than water, extending its working life into the memory of people still alive in Prestine. The ecomuseum profile places the sawmill in the chain of water-powered sites it protects, noting that it too was originally moved by the waters of the Vaso Re system. Prestine itself, absorbed by Bienno in a 2016 merger after centuries of self-government — the valley tourism portal records its tax exemptions granted by the Venetian Senate in 1433 — gives the sawmill its peculiar civic status: a communal workshop owned by families, in a village that negotiated as an equal with dukes and doges.