Mulino del Moro (Mora Bassa)

A short distance from Vigevano's centre, the fifteenth-century mill of Mora Bassa still turns its two great water wheels on the Roggia Mora. Owned by an irrigation consortium and home to fifty working reconstructions of Leonardo's machines, it is the city's most tangible piece of hydraulic heritage.

Why it matters

Vigevano was built on water: ducal canals, defensive embankments and grain mills made the Sforza project possible, and the mulino del Moro at Mora Bassa keeps that system audible and moving. The municipal portal presents it as a magnificent fifteenth-century mill whose two large hydraulic wheels still function, and since the site hosts the Ecomuseo della Roggia Mora, a visit pairs industrial archaeology with the engineering culture Leonardo brought to these waters. The mill belongs to the Associazione Irrigazione Est Sesia, the irrigation board that still manages the district's channels, so the machine you see working is not a relic: it sits inside a living water infrastructure.

What to notice

The double water wheel is the site's defining image, drawing on the flow of the Roggia Mora. Inside, the permanent exhibition displays fifty models of Leonardo's machines, built as faithful reconstructions of his drawings by the Florentine craftsman Gabriele Niccolai with Dario Noè, in fine woods and finished to working order. The models illustrate what Leonardo called his "elementi machinali" — the endless screw, toothed wheel, pulley, connecting rod and chain — drawn above all from the Codex Atlanticus and the Madrid Codex I, his treatise on mechanics. The presentation also recounts the romantic legend that binds the mill to the Lady with an Ermine and Ludovico il Moro, while distinguishing it from documented history.

Context and history

The mill belongs to the water landscape created for the Sforza court: the regulation and diversion of the Mora and the Naviglio di Vigevano, works in which Leonardo da Vinci took a documented interest and which he recorded in manuscripts that survive, including Codex H. Alongside the mill of Porta Nuova inside the city — raised by Ludovico il Moro directly against the terraggi, the defensive embankments built as two great parallel walls with an elevated walkway between them, of which some three hundred metres survive — Mora Bassa represents the rural wing of that system, where grain from the Lomellina plain met ducal engineering. Porta Nuova's great wooden wheel, millstones and miller's tools preserve another part of the area's milling history. The ecomuseum project formalises this reading, connecting the mill to the Parco Lombardo del Ticino and to a wider itinerary of mills, canals and rice-culture sites across the district.