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Mattanza,[1][2] literally 'slaughter' or 'killing' in Italian, also known asalmadraba in Spanish andalmadrava in Portuguese, is a traditional tuna fishing technique that uses a series of large nets to trap and exhaust the fish.
There aremattanza traditions linked toTrapani inSicily, theEgadi island ofFavignana, andCarloforte and theIsola di San Pietro in southwesternSardinia, as well as locations inSpain,Portugal,Morocco, andTunisia.
The practice ofmattanza is an elaborate and age-old fishing technique for trapping and catchingAtlantic bluefin tuna that can be traced back to thePhoenicians.
While it is unclear how the technique was spread around the Mediterranean basin, it was also imparted to areas such asIberia during Iberia's Islamic period.[3]
The Spanish derive the termalmadraba (Portuguese:almadrava) from theAndalusi Arabic wordal-maḍraba (المضربة), meaning 'a place to strike' (Arabic root:ḍaraba (ضرب), meaning 'it struck, hit').[3] The introduction in Sicily and Sardinia, but not mainland Italy, is also either attributed to theMoors, duringSicily's own Islamic period or by the Spanish afterwards.
From March the tuna schools migrate through the Strait of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean to visit their spawning grounds.
From May onwards, fishermen drive schools of fish in straits into a system of nets (known in Italian astonnara[4]), that form various chambers. The tuna are guided through the chambers, which are being drawn closer and closer together, to the inner chamber (southern Italian:càmira dâ morti, literally "death chamber"), from which they are then lifted onto the fishing boats with grappling hooks. The tuna caught is processed on land directly in thetonnara (fromtonno, meaning "tuna").[5]
Traditional Italian locations for themattanza includeTrapani,Favignana,Capo Passero, Formica, Bonagia,Scopello,Castellammare del Golfo,San Vito Lo Capo,Portopalo and Capo Granitola and in the Sardinian locals ofSant'Antioco andCarloforte.There are other locations inAndalusia,Murcia andValencia inSpain,Algarve inPortugal, Sidi Daoud inTunisia and inMorocco.[6][7]
Thebycatch contains, among others,bullet tuna (Auxis rochei),little tunny (Euthynnus alletteratus),Atlantic bonito (Sarda sarda),bigeye tuna (Thunnus obesus) andswordfish (Xiphias gladius). However, theAtlantic bluefin tuna yields of themattanza are constantly falling due to the overfishing of the stocks, so that themattanza is more of a tourist event today.
In Italy, in 2003 and 2004, it could no longer take place in Trapani. The schools of tuna had already been fully fished beforehand by international fishing fleets long before they approach coastal areas were they can be caught with themattanza traps. The last slaughter in Sicily took place in the Favignana trap in 2007. In 2015, only one slaughter took place in Sardinia, between Portoscuso and Carloforte. The Ministry of Agricultural, Food and Forestry Policies still authorizes six fixed traps in Italy every year: Flat island and Cala Vinagra (Carloforte), Capo Altano and Porto Paglia (Portoscuso), Favignana, Camogli.
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