Florence Mills Quotes

Beautiful Florence has all seven of the fundamental things a city requires for perfection,” the essayist Benedetto Dei wrote in 1472, when Leonardo was living there. “First of all, it enjoys complete liberty; second, it has a large, rich, and elegantly dressed population; third, it has a river with clear, pure water, and mills within its walls; fourth, it rules over castles, towns, lands and people; fifth, it has a university, and both Greek and accounting are taught; sixth, it has masters in every art; seventh, it has banks and business agents all over the world.

A convent was not merely a place of prayer and seclusion. It also operated as a business enterprise—and, in the case of San Jacopo di Ripoli, a thriving one whose assets had steadily been built up over the course of the previous century through shrewd investments, mostly in property. In the 1470s the convent owned some ten houses in Florence that it rented to a variety of tenants, including woolworkers, a butcher, a sawyer, a kiln worker, and a chicken seller. It owned a workshop rented out to a linen merchant, two mills, nine farms, as well as various fields, orchards, and vineyards scattered around the countryside.

There were a number of early water-powered mills around Green Hill.  Duncan Smith, Berry McDonald, Thomas Ross, Isham Richardson, and Enoch Raleigh Kennedy had gristmills on Cow Pen Creek.