Mattanza: Love and Death in the Sea of Sicily [Hardcover]

Theresa Maggio (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 2000

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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

A mattanza, in Italian, is a slaughter--in the instance Theresa Maggio relates, a springtime slaughter of bluefin tuna, the fish highly prized by sports fishermen and gourmands. In these elegant pages, Maggio describes the hard lives of Sicilian fishermen who chase the bluefin, reenacting a hunt that extends far back into prehistory and whose rituals, including that ceremonial massacre, have gone essentially unchanged for thousands of years.

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

From Publishers Weekly

It is important to remember this slim book's subtitle. Its subject is in fact la mattanza (literally, the slaughter), the ancient and ritualistic blue-fin tuna catch that preoccupies fishing societies along the eastern Mediterranean beginning in early spring. Blue-fin tuna are "giants, eight-feet long, some bigger"; every year during la mattanza, hundreds of the tuna are caught and hauled up by teams of local fishermen. Maggio is a travel writer who has spent the last 15 years visiting the Sicilian island of Favignana, where the men who work the giant tuna traps have slowly accepted her as a part of their decidedly masculine circle. Her relationship with the island, its denizens and the waning glory of la mattanza tradition is both obsessive and tender. At her best, Maggio is a wry storyteller and a lyrical verbal landscapist. Perhaps unconsciously, she sometimes slips into the bare narrative of an absent but inescapable literary forebear--as if the very presence of muscled men wrestling with giants of the sea demands the voice of Hemingway. But hers is not a simple account of man vs. nature: it's an eloquent tribute to a unique community, where the local Madonna cradles a slippery fish in place of the Messiah and wild cats dine on homemade pasta served on paper plates. If the author asserts herself too frequently as the protagonist of her story, it is only because Favignana needs to be diluted with an outsider's curiosity in order to be digested. And after all, what is a love story without a lover? 30 b&w photos. 8-city author tour. (May)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Counterpoint; First Edition edition (April 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 073820269X
• ISBN-13: 978-0738202693
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #710,818 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A wonderful book which takes you on a trip with the author., April 16, 2000

By 

Dorothy Haviland (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mattanza: Love and Death in the Sea of Sicily (Hardcover)

Mattanza Love and Death In The Sea of Sicily by Theresa Maggio pulls you into the world of the men and customs found only on this small island.

Theresa Maggio not only tells a wonderful story, but she is able to paint the scenes and views she has seen into the readers mind. You can see the colorful boats owned by the fishermen, smell the drying nets as they hang in the damp cannery building, and feel the warm sun as she rides her bike from her tiny room into the piazza to wait for her voyage to the chamber of death out at sea.

I am always looking in the NYT travel section for Miss Maggio's travel stories which have appeared over the years. Her photographs are wonderful and revealing of a time and tempo of the villages she visits and shares with us.

Her book is scientifically accurate, honest and a very lovely read.

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Mattanza Love & Death on the Sea of Sicily, May 2, 2000

By 

jackie farrow - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mattanza: Love and Death in the Sea of Sicily (Hardcover)

I find Theresa Maggio's fluid style of writing makes me feel that I have actually witnessed what she has described through words. After reading "Mattanza", I felt sad that this ritual is a dying traditon. Maggio has captured another world and brought it into our culture. Thank You Ms. Maggio for this armchair adventure.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Something for everyone!, May 5, 2000

By 

Sharon Rice (Boston) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mattanza: Love and Death in the Sea of Sicily (Hardcover)

Theresa Maggio has an incredible gift--the ability to write in a way so as to make the reader feel the experiences as opposed to just observing. MATTANZA is an incredible read--a journey of the heart and soul in the exotic beauty of Italy. A MUST-READ!