Tuna

Tuna is a migratory fish whose spring passage into the Mediterranean has for centuries set the rhythm of the tonnara; in the Florios’ story it is also a test of whether Sicilian production can move beyond inherited methods and reach wider markets. Its seasonal abundance supports a whole working community, but changing demand makes salting alone less secure. Vincenzo Florio’s response is to develop tuna cooked and sealed in oil, a preservation method that turns the catch from a traditional staple into an expanding commercial venture.

The fish and the seasonal cycle

Tuna travel in shoals that may number hundreds, moving many miles through the sea. In mild spring weather they pass from the Atlantic into the Mediterranean to reproduce. The novel describes their arrival in vivid, physical terms: great masses of silvery fish stir the water with splashes, waves, and sound. When the season comes, the tonnara is lowered into the sea, its nets laid to receive the shoals on a full-moon night. The account sets this recurring work against a long historical measure: Herodotus had described the nets and the coming tuna in the fifth century BC, and the practice continued for centuries before the change the narrative announces.

This cycle organizes more than fishing. The tonnara is a place where families have lived and worked across generations, with men at sea and women in the processing plants. Winter is given to repairing ships and mending nets; spring and summer bring the slaughter and the work of preparing the catch. The fish therefore belongs to an entire seasonal economy, one in which maritime skill, family labor, and the calendar of migration meet at the shore.

A valuable catch, an uncertain market

The fish is prized in part because almost none of it goes to waste. Its tender red flesh is processed, salted, and sold in large barrels; its skin and bones are dried, ground, and used as fertilizer; its fat supplies lamps; and its eggs become costly roe. The nickname “sea pig” captures this comprehensive use of the animal: the catch is not a single product but a collection of materials with different purposes and markets.

Yet abundance does not guarantee profit. In a discussion of the Arenella fishery, Carlo Giachery reports that tuna sales have fallen, and that demand for sardines and mackerel is declining too—not only in Sicily but across the tonnaras. Vincenzo Florio points to the contrast between fresh meat, preserved with ice from the Madonie Mountains, and tuna, which has traditionally been salted. The inherited method now faces a market problem: shipping companies and sailors are wary of salted tuna because they believe it causes scurvy, and much of the product remains unsold.

The timing sharpens the pressure. Vincenzo checks the calendar and notes that the next mattanza at Arenella is ten days away. When the May season begins, the first tonnaras are lowered and the catch is plentiful; in one mattanza alone, three thousand tuna have already been caught, with further catches expected because the season has only just started. This is not scarcity but the difficulty of making a large, seasonal catch commercially usable when buyers distrust its established form.

Vincenzo’s preservation experiment

Vincenzo’s proposed answer is to alter the product rather than accept the limits of salting. He explains that the tuna will be cut and boiled, then preserved in oil inside airtight barrels. Oil is being unloaded from the family’s steamboat for the work. The plan is not an untested impulse: with Giachery’s help, Vincenzo has been experimenting for several years with tuna from Arenella and San Nicolò l’Arena, and says the project has been under way for more than three years.

The method requires changes to the workplace as well as to the recipe. Vincenzo intends to adapt the marfaraggio by installing an area for boilers to cook the fish and accommodation for seasonal workers. He wants to employ families, not only fishermen. Preservation thus reaches beyond the fish itself: it entails new equipment, a reconfigured processing site, and a broader labor force. The catch is made durable through coordinated work, from the arrival of oil to cooking, sealing, and preparation for shipment.

Vincenzo presents the experiment as a practical response to a wider economic problem. He recalls that people dismissed the idea of a workshop in Palermo, insisting that only small shops could survive there, yet he bought the Oretea foundry from the Sgroi brothers. Tuna in oil belongs to the same effort to think beyond what local custom or commercial skepticism declares possible. His defense is grounded in evidence rather than a claim to visionary status: the fish has been canned and sold for years, and demand, he says, continues to grow. He invokes the Sicilian saying “Dunami tempo, dissi u’ surci a’ nuci, ca ti percio,” expressing the patient persistence required to break through resistance.

From local fishery to Mediterranean trade

The transformation has a substantial commercial horizon. Vincenzo has managed the Favignana tonnara for ten years and regards it as his masterpiece, though its rent remains high. Building the operation required a network of entrepreneurs and the assumption of risks attached to a new preservation method. By the time he brings another person to the site for the first time, tuna in oil has spread throughout the Mediterranean. The product’s reach marks a change in scale: a seasonal catch handled at a Sicilian fishery can become a preserved commodity circulating across a much wider market.

That expansion depends on more than the fish’s abundance. The narrative has already situated Sicilian trade within routes linking foreign suppliers, ports, and merchants: spices, for example, travel through long chains of hands and across oceans before reaching customers, while Palermo’s position as a free port draws goods and sailors from across the Mediterranean. Tuna in oil offers a different possibility within that connected world. Rather than simply buying and reselling imported goods, the Florios seek to process a local marine resource into a product suitable for long-distance trade. The new method joins the sea’s seasonal gift to industrial processing, transport, and commercial networks.

The venture does not erase the physical remainder of production. At Favignana, Vincenzo points to the bosco, which he calls the tuna cemetery: workers unload carcasses there and leave them in the sun to dry, while leftovers decompose and produce a smell. This detail complicates the language of efficiency and total use associated with the sea pig. The fish yields many valuable products, but processing also leaves waste and an exposed landscape of remains. Tuna consequently stands for both the ingenuity that extracts value from a catch and the material costs of turning that catch into an industry.

Narrative significance

Tuna links long-established communal practice to a modernizing commercial ambition. The nets, the full-moon catch, and the seasonal division of labor give the fishery a continuity reaching back centuries; the boilers, airtight containers, steamboat-delivered oil, and expanded workforce alter how the catch can be processed and sold. The narrative’s decisive contrast is not between tradition and change as simple opposites. Vincenzo’s innovation depends on the fishery’s inherited knowledge and seasonal labor, even as it restructures processing to meet the demands of shipping and a Mediterranean market.

The fish also gives the Florio story a material measure of ambition. A plentiful catch can become an economic liability when its conventional preservation method loses buyers; experimentation can turn that same catch into a product whose demand is growing. Tuna’s passage through the story therefore traces a sequence from migration, communal labor, and slaughter to preservation, distribution, and wider commercial reach. Its significance lies in how closely the sea’s recurring abundance is bound to human systems of work—and in how a change to one stage of that system can reshape the future of the whole enterprise.