Attracted by its beauty many Italian and foreigner artists have painted and photographed it from many angle shots, so that today we can exactly know how it looked like in the last century.
It is part of the system of deep valleys that crossed Sorrento Peninsula until the beginning of the century and constituted its natural borders.
It extended from Piazza Tasso to Marina Piccola, forming a charming port on the sea of Sorrento. Its name derives from a mill, whose ruins are still visible, that was working until the first years of the twentieth century, covering the corn’s needs of Sorrento inhabitants.
The spring waters that fed it and the streams coming from the hill fed also a saw mill that supplied the local craftsmen with different kinds of timber: cherry wood, walnut and olive. Moreover, women were used to go there to wash cloths in a public wash tub.
As testified by representations of the time, the "Vallone dei Mulini" was a lively and populated place thanks to its direct communication with the sea which allowed the winds to take away humidity and make the place visible.
After the building of the present Piazza Tasso and then of the sea outlet’s barrage, it was progressively abandoned and transformed in the ideal habitat of a luxuriant quality of ferns, whose very rare species have been recently identified through a survey.