All photos courtesy of Modio Media.
In 2001, a few years after returning from Sicily, I was asked to write a review of Theresa Maggio’s riveting memoir/travelogue Mattanza: Love and Death in the Sea of Sicily. In it, Maggio follows the ancient ritual of the tuna slaughter—the word mattanza derives from the Spanish matar, to kill—more or less in springtime close to Favignana, one of a smattering of islands that makes up the Egadi archipelago, a half-hour ferry ride from Trapani on the island’s western coastline facing Africa. There’s a millennial connection between North Africa’s and Sicily’s once-thriving fishing industries. I’ve met Sicilians who were born there over the years, including a good friend of my father’s who was also a member of a social club that our lives heavily revolved around when we first moved from Chicago to San Jose, California.
Requiem for a Mattanza
Due to sheer proximity that naturally invited cross-cultural pollination (and countless invasions) traveling across the Sicilian Strait in either direction, it follows that Sicilian’s heavily tinged with Arabic, including the name ascribed to the head fisherman solely responsible for calling the date and place of the mattanza. In this historically male sphere, the chief, or rais, was chosen by his peers for his prowess, hands-on experience, and for his coolheadedness, one hopes, while looking down into the chamber of death, la camera della morte, ensnaring the massive tuna inside before their gruesome demise. Mostly due to heavily overfished waters, the last mattanza of Favignana happened in 2007. The fisherman’s cooperative responsible for organizing it had also lost its funding and its management had fallen into the grasping hands of outside entrepreneurs who dreamt up truly outlandish ways to increase headcounts. One suggestion was for tonnaroti to don period costumes while they chanted in unison and jabbed away at the frenzied tuna with long batons. Strangely, the whole spectacle brought to the mind’s eye Anthony Quinn’s character in the 1960s teleplay Requiem for a Heavyweight about a down-on-his-luck boxer of indigenous background whose manager forces him to don a Native American headdress while performing a pre-match pow wow dance to boost spectators’ enjoyment.
My visit to Favignana in summer of 1999 was years before the tradition truly faded away, though “requiem for a mattanza” was an apt way of describing the day I travelled down the coast from Palermo. I was lucky that a photographer friend called me as soon as he’d heard that the mattanza was on for the following day. At the time, Giuseppe travelled around Sicily photographing historical sites for the regional government’s cultural heritage department: He’d take pictures while I captured footage. He and his then-partner lived in Trapani, an easy trip to Favignana that lay closest to terra firma. On a Saturday morning, we caught an early ferry accompanied by a friend of mine from Palermo who sometimes assisted me in the field. As we clipped across the water, we could see the tonnarroti (tuna fishermen) had already started laying nets, their boats jostling tight against each other, like a massive floating huddle. Once docked, we headed to where other fishermen were loading ice and equipment onto boats. A number of tourists had already begun assembling on the dock before boarding chartered boats that would shuttle them to the site that the rais had selected for that day’s mattanza.
One group of Italian tourists sported T-shirts emblazoned with “Favignana, La Mattanza” across the front, likely bought at one of the Favignana’s souvenir shops on the main square. They smacked of gaudy souvenir merchandise that hit the market right after the ‘89 Loma Prieta Earthquake, which I’d experienced first-hand while attending graduate school in San Francisco. As fishermen tossed bags of ice inside that landed with a crushing plop inside the wooden boats, a wizened man sporting a green baseball hat, our chartered skipper, paced back and forth on the dock and carried on a fiery exchange with an unseen interlocutor in the crowd of men working below, every sentence punctuated with a sharp hand movement. “When are you going out?”, he barked, tracing circular movements with a half-closed fist. Moments later, I saw two men fall in step behind him as he headed down the dock to his boat. Camera gear flailing, I ran to catch up.
Out at sea, dozens of boats were tightly packed together, so close that people hopped from one boat to another to greet friends or to get a better vantage point of the tonnaroti in their long boats pressed along the perimeter of the death chamber. A small blue charter bobbing up and down next to ours had Tre Sorelle (three sisters) that had been scrawled across a few sides the cabin’s exterior, perhaps in honor of the skipper’s siblings or children or as a nod to the archipelago’s three main islands, Marettimo, Levane and Favignana? It was plausible: “isola” the word for island is feminine in both Italian and Sicilian. Sicily’s steeped in ancient mythology and natural phenomena, often endowed with anthropomorphic traits, are largely described as female, Majestic with a fiery temper, Mount Etna’s the most notable example, deferentially called ‘a muntagna by residents.
We’d been out on the water for some time. It was still early and strong currents rocked the boat. More boats packed with tourists arrived, adding another layer of vessels to the huddle around the intricate net system stretched across many meters below the water’s surface. The din of voices rose and fell as people shouted to each other across the layers of boats. The June heat was hard and relentless overhead. Some of the spectators cooled off by jumping in the water in diving masks to see what was happening below. Tensions flared, too. An older gentleman screamed at a woman to move out of the way so he could have a better view. Some were seasick and had to be shuttled back to port. I had also started to feel queasy as our small boat lifted off the water. One of the tonnaroti hopped over to our boat, and, taking a seat, began tying nautical knots on a small piece of string. This man was Clemente Ventrone, the vice-rais, one of the most photographed among the Favignana fishermen, indubitably the most physically striking, with his curly blond hair framing a leonine face, a tangle of gold chains–one had a large tuna’s tooth–splayed across his golden skin. He truly radiated the color gold. As the string dribbled between his smallish curved feet, an argument broke out on a nearby boat between two groups over who had first dibs on the best viewing position. “Non mi è mi capitato una cosa del genere!” (Nothing like this has ever happened to me!) an irate woman sputtered. Being a T-shirt day, she herself was wearing one that read Funny Days, which, between the unrelenting heat and the pettiness of the argument itself, wasn’t so funny.
Word drifted across the boats that Gioacchino Cataldo—he was the last of the great rais of Favignana who passed away in 2018 after 33 years as a tonnaroto, had called off the mattanza. The currents were still too turbulent and it was unlikely that the tuna would swim in our direction that day. One by one, the boats headed back to port and the disappointed tourists back to the mainland. We had time to spare and we had our camera equipment. We headed to the sprawling grounds of the old Florio cannery (Vincenzo Florio was the entrepreneur who came up with the idea of preserving tuna in oil industrially) located at the end of a street encircling the small port, today, a museum that’s been meticulously restored. It was once one of the largest tuna-canning factories in the Mediterranean employing generations of islanders until it ceased operations in the late 1970s. Seen from the outside, it resembles a residential palazzo, though massive in scale. Passing through the original entrance, you find yourself inside a light-filled courtyard filled with trees. In one of the outbuildings, we wandered through a maze of rooms that included a kitchen and worker’s dining room. Another hallway led to the canning facility that held all manner of machinery including one for filling the cans with oil. In one room, thousands of flattened cans stamped with the ornate Florio label littered the floor. Now, I imagined rows of workers side-by-side in these rooms, the women with kerchiefs tied around their heads as they sat descaling tuna at long, massive tables and chit-chatted about work, their children and lives. The cannery might have appeared just as it was the very day it closed its doors for good.
There were personal mementos. Inside some of the opened lockers, I could see crudely assembled collages of pin-up girls. A Barbie Doll’s severed head lay on the floor, its plastic hair styled into a mohawk. Apparently, punk style had even reached these off-shore environs. Giuseppe hung it on the wall and snapped a photo. Inside the complex, small fishing boats were kept behind locked gates facing the port and which, at the time of my visit, were still in use. For several minutes, I filmed the tidal waters as they rushed under the iron gates and were quickly sucked back out to sea. Before taking the ferry to Trapani, we stopped by the cooperative office where I picked up my tripod. We’d been invited to eat with the tonnaroti but Giuseppe thought it best to take a rain check. The rais was chatting away on the phone, his massive hands were like shovels, like those of my grandfather. I have a keepsake from that day that hangs in my home: A black and white photo that Giuseppe snapped of a narrow, arched pathway sandwiched between two crumbling walls pointing the way to the sea.
I never returned to Favignana. A few weeks after the aborted mattanza, word came that it was to be held that day. We sped to Trapani and just missed the early ferry. Giuseppe was already there and phoned that it had been called off. I noted that the mattanza was fickle by its very nature, as unpredictable as the rushing tides that I found so mesmerizing. The writing was on the wall for other mattanze around the island. That same year, fishermen laid their nets for their final mattanza in the village of Portopalo di Capo Passero, Sicily’s southernmost tip that forms one of the island’s three points. Curious, I did an online search and quickly located a video from that day depicting the fishermen preparing their nets. We see them intoning a song out at sea, even cajoling and joking with each other as they unbundled their massive nets. In the final scene, the fishermen assemble and strike a pose for a final photograph. There wasn’t any mention of any tuna caught that day, nor that they’d lowered their nets into the sea nor the presence of onlookers. I wondered: Had they simply gone through the motions of staging a mise en scène to give a semblance of closure to a custom that their ancestors had practiced for centuries? Yes, I thought, better to close on a note of dignity than of tears.
Afterword: Since 1999, I’ve had ample time to reflect on what my feelings are on the mattanza. While I lament the demise of popular traditions, at this point we’ve irreparably depleted our world’s fisheries. If the mattanza had happened the day I’d visited, it would have been profoundly disturbing and, in some ways, the fact that I was witnessing its very demise made it that much more poignant. In one of his last interviews, rais Giacchino Cataldo, reflected on what had been his livelihood for over three decades and how he viewed the mattanza. “The tuna fishery is life. There is blood but it isn’t a spectacle of death, it’s fishing.” For me, Favignana’s fishermen, their unassailable spirit and respect for the old ways and ancestors, will always remain a sign of Sicilian fortitude and originality.
I respect the fishermen, their old ways, their hymns and know-how, but with the world’s biodiversity in more peril than ever, this is one tradition that is best left to the past.
A Chicago native mostly raised in Northern California, Gia Marie Amella co-founded Modio Media Productions Inc. in 2006, an Emmy-nominated video and television production company whose work has aired on news and entertainment networks worldwide. She earned her M.A. in Radio-Television (1993) from San Francisco State University, where she also served as an adjunct lecturer in the Broadcast & Electronic Communication Arts Department, and a B.A. in Italian Literature (1988) from the University of California, Santa Cruz. The recipient of numerous awards for achievements in her field, in 1998 she received a Fulbright Fellowship supporting her research on popular traditions and identity in Sicily, her ancestors’ homeland. Her writing has appeared in National Geographic, Green Living Magazine, Italy Magazine, The Italian American Review, and Cnn.com. She lives in Montevarchi, Tuscany with her life and work partner and rescue cat.
