Miraculous Milk Caves in Italy

However, you can read a quick summary below.

Perhaps we can shed some light as to how the cave waters were used in deep antiquity by looking at the practices of the Etruscans and Romans. They collected the cloudy, mineral-laden liquid issuing forth from the breast-shaped stalactites and used it as an emollient to ensure nursing mothers produced ample breast milk. Such caverns came to be known as milk caves (lattaie) with the cloudy colored waters they produced called mountain milk (latte di monte) or moonmilk (latte di luna). The term moonmilk is refers to an ancient notion that the liquid was produced when the moon’s rays flowed through rock.  

Over the millennia, these vases, left in situ, in the Grotto of Scaloria were encased in limestone and permanently attached to the ground and often, stalagmites grew out of them. While archeologists have been able to roughly date these objects to circa 6,000 B.C. nothing definitive can be said about their exact function.

In the not too distant past women came to these caverns to collect drip water and massage it into their breasts to assure adequate breastmilk.

Laboratory testing shows that moonmilk is composed of micro-crystals and has a varied combination of chemical and biological components:

• Macromonas bipunctata, is a Gram negative bacterium that is heterotrophic and a strict aerobe.  It is composed largely of calcium carboxylate which plays a key role in metabolizing organic acids and precipitating calcite into the long crystal form which makes up moonmilk. 

• Cyanobacteria

• Fungi

• green algae

• Actinomycetales a group of Gram-positive bacteria including Streptomyces. 

Almost two thirds of the natural antimicrobial drug compounds used currently are produced by different species of Actinomycetales. 

Collectively, these components are known to promote healing.