“The nets have been cast, the mesh is stretched”

“The nets have been cast, the mesh is stretched” is an expression recalling a passage attributed to Herodotus about tuna fishing. Its decisive significance lies in its placement: after a historical account of Bourbon reaction and the surviving momentum of the exiles, it introduces the tonnara as an old, recurrent practice poised to begin again.

The remembered words and their source

The passage presents the image in capital letters, then extends it with the prediction that tuna will enter the nets on a full-moon night. The text attributes these words to Herodotus in the fifth century B.C. The saying is therefore framed not as a newly coined observation but as an inherited description, carrying the weight of a practice said to have endured for centuries.

From political history to the sea

The expression follows a compressed account of Bourbon rule as reactionary and resistant to economic and social progress, and of the patriotic energy of the 1848 exiles continuing through their writings and interventions. It then marks a sharp change of subject: from political power and resistance to the movements of tuna and the preparations for fishing. The transition gives the ancient image the force of a narrative hinge, moving from historical pressures to a seasonal cycle.

The net and the seasonal return

The tuna are described as peaceful, silver-skinned animals that travel in shoals of hundreds and cross from the Atlantic into the Mediterranean in spring to reproduce. Their fatty bodies are ready to mate when the tonnara is lowered. Against that account of migration and abundance, the stretched mesh signifies a human system waiting for the fish to arrive. The passage ends at the moment the trap is set, leaving the catch itself just beyond the threshold.

Repetition and interruption

The statement that this has been the way of things for centuries is followed by “Until now.” That brief interruption unsettles the apparent continuity of the inherited practice. The text does not explain the change in this passage; instead, the net image and the abrupt qualification leave the reader poised between repetition and an approaching break. The expression thus serves both as a concrete description of tuna fishing and as a suspenseful frame for what is about to follow.