Mattanza: Love and Death in the Sea of Sicily

Maggio, a former science writer at the Los Alamos National Scientific Laboratory, first traveled to her ancestral island in her early 30s. On the rocky coast of Favignana she witnessed her first mattanza, an unexpected "font of primal energy, beauty, and suffering, all in a tiny square of sea." After observing the coordinated efforts of the fishermen, who battled to drive the three-quarter-ton fish into a carefully constructed maze of net traps, Maggio came to develop an appreciation for the hunt in Sicilian village life. It is a ritual as laden with meaning as the buffalo hunt in Plains Indian cultures.

Maggio's memoir of life, death, and hard work in a dangerous sea joins with Peter Matthiessen's Men's Lives as a thoughtful study in human ecology. --Gregory McNamee

Book Description
A magnificent journey inside the world of a Sicilian fishing community and its thousand-year-old rituals

Every spring for untold centuries, great schools of giant bluefin tuna have swum through the Strait of Gibraltar to spawn in the Mediterranean Sea. And there, for untold centuries, men have been waiting for them. In this stunning debut, Theresa Maggio brings us inside the insular world of the tonnara-the ritual trapping and killing of bluefin enacted by fishermen since the Stone Age. In a single, bloody spectacle-called the mattanza-the fishermen harvest the bluefin, lifting them by hand from the Chamber of Death, the last room in an elaborate trap.

Theresa Maggio witnessed her first mattanza on Favignana, a butterfly-shaped island off the coast of Sicily. Brought to the island by a fisherman who was in love with her, Maggio in turn fell in love with Favignana, with its white magic and stonework, its anchors and nets. Penetrating this exotic, all-male world as no woman has before her, Maggio documents a dark and beautiful ritual that might soon disappear-a casualty of the modern fishing industry. Part memoir, part natural history, part travelogue, Mattanza is a riveting narrative of one woman's journey into another world, a world where moon lemons grow wild, and where the sea holds the promise of renewal.

The book is more romance than reportage, as Maggio tries to capture the life, rhythm, rituals, myths, and, yes, romance of life on the island, centering her story on the fishermen who deploy the nets and traps that gather hundreds of the giant bluefins for slaughter. The tuna once made the island prosperous, but declining numbers of fish and competition from long-line trawlers has taken its toll (the island's cannery closed in 1981, throwing a thousand people out of work), and soon the ritual of the mattanza will probably disappear from Favignana, leaving pretty much nothing but tourism behind.

(As a reader in Tokyo, I was surprised to see a Japan connection: it's Japan's voracious appetite for sashimi that's helping keep the mattanza going: when the bluefin tuna are slaughtered, the Japanese are waiting to send them off to the tuna auction at giant Tsukiji Wholesale Market in Tokyo. Maggio includes a rather over-the-top chapter about Japanese sushi, exaggerating (in my opinion) the ritual and price of sushi: she quotes 10-year-old Bubble-Era prices for tuna (in 1992, she says, a 715-pound bluefin was sold for $83,500, or about $117 a pound) and extrapolates from that, despite the fact that the average price is a very small fraction of that peak.

(The kind of highly stylized sushi places she describes, where they sell toro for $75 a plate, are places I've never set foot in and probably never will: I go to the far more common, far more plebian "kaiten zushi" (conveyor belt sushi) restaurants, where I can snarf down maguro and toro for about $1 to 2 a plate. Sure, the fish isn't the highest quality, the atmosphere is utilitarian, and the wasabi is reconstituted from powder, but it's still tasty and, I think, a more usual experience than the romantic and ritualistic kind Maggio describes.)

But I like the book, I must say. Maybe I'll tackle the Lawrence Durell book on Corfu on my shelf next.


Fish Story   August 9, 2003
 6 out of 6 found this review helpful

Theresa Maggio has done us a favor by providing a well-written book about a subject little-known to the English-speaking world: I refer to the mattanzas, or communal bluefin tuna kills, that have been a feature of Sicilian life for over a thousand years. In the process, she has introduced us to dozens of colorful characters and an obscure island off the northwest coast of Sicily.

Curiously, it is the Japanese -- not the Italians -- for whom most of the tuna is reserved. They have factory ships offshore for processing the tuna into sushi and packing it to fly back home under ice. These mattanzas are intensely covered by the Japanese news media, as Ms. Maggio shows, because bluefin sushi is highly desirable, rare, and goes for astronomical prices in Tokyo.

Over the last two or three decades, the number of tuna and their size has declined steadily. One reason is that, at the time the book was written, European fishermen had overfished the tuna using purse seines. Off the coast of North America, stricter controls are in effect to allow the species to recover.

The process of luring the tuna into the elaborate traps for the mattanza is complex and deeply embedded in Sicilian lore. It calls for patience, strength, courage, and wiliness -- qualities which are fast disappearing as the knowledge has not been passed on due to the decreasing number of old hands available to impart the knowledge.

The only failure of the book is not the author's, but the publisher's. Explanatory photos and more schematics than the single one (in Italian) appearing on the front and rear endpapers are essential to support the text. There are some small photos that are marginally discernible, but plates would have been better. The mattanza is a complicated event, and I feel this is a serious omission. In every other way, I wholeheartedly recommend Maggio's work.


Get Sweaty   November 22, 2002
 4 out of 4 found this review helpful

Sicilians perform dramatic killing rituals. Traveling lady gets down with the local men. Greed destroys nature and wrecks a proud island culture.
Whatever way you cut it, this is a passionate jewel of a book. I can't imagine how many drafts the author wrote to distill her years of meticulous note-taking. Every chapter has a photo or drawing, a delightful touch that only suggests the thousands of such shots she must have taken.

Maggio's sensuous observations of the island, her candid personal impressions, and her subtle political commentary will make you think -- and sweat.

(This review refers to the earlier edition with the less hyped title.)


A piece of Sicily   September 12, 2002
 2 out of 2 found this review helpful

This woman is a great writer. she brings you right to
the subject at hand, this one being an ancient fishing
rite, populated by real, breathing (sexy sometimes) men.

You have to read the whole book too!

amazing.