Customer Reviews

Mattanza: Love and Death in the Sea of Sicily

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3 star:		(1)
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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.

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.

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!

This book was fascinating! Theresa's story will captivate you as you go to Sicily's Egadi Islands. She documents the history of the Mattanza and the people who live their life on the sea. This true story of love and death will make excellent reading on the beack or by the pool this summer.

Theresa Maggio has a beautiful writing style, which is very descriptive.

The book, "Mattanza," begins with a bang, when Maggio describes the first time she views the trapping and killing of bluefin tuna. As I read her description of the mattanza, I found it awesome, fascinating and sad. I could actually visualize the fishermen and the giant bluefin tuna. I could envision both fishes and men struggling to win their own goal - life. The origins of the mattanza ritual are interesting. Maggio explains it in such a way that keeps you wanting to know more.

I also enjoyed the fact that the book is not only about the mattanza. It is also about Maggio's stay in Favignana -- the people she met, her relationship with them and the fishermen. After reading the book, I felt as if I knew and understood the fishermen who perform the mattanza.

If you're looking for a different book on Italy, a place where classical mythology is said to have occurred, a book filled with interesting natural history facts, culture, and sprinkled with a little romance, "Mattanza" is the book for you!

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.

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.)

What a pity this books seems to have dropped from print. Forget Mayle and Mayes with their renovated houses and expensive habits, and gushing nonsense. This is the real Mediterranean, where people are proud but poor (Stendhal says that Italians have no shame about poverty) and attempt to hold on to their centuries-old traditions in the face of declining fishing stocks and changing economic circumstances. Maggio's book is a wonderful testament to these noble men who love their life in spite of its precarious nature--the perfect foil for having to deal with boring MTV-types.

I picked up this book as part of my recent Mediterranean travel book kick.

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.

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.