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Salvatorre and Bruno, brothers who ran a bed and breakfast in town, were two of the

6,000 or so local inhabitants. They stood out in their black, grunge clothes and look. I came

to know them as the island’s activists. They engaged in a range of mostly local politics from

hospital funding through to tuna fishing. They instigated activities, including the distribution

of Greenpeace flyers and also self-authored material, both of which offered a counter

narrative to the Giro di Tonno. While the brothers clearly aligned themselves with

Greenpeace, very specific social issues also motivated them, including the community’s upset

over the decline in the local tuna harvest. They blamed the tonnara owners and local

government, who, they said, were pouring money into the festival instead of important

community services. Salvatorre handed me two flyers to make a point about the dissonance

between the narratives of tuna in the Giro di Tonno flyer and in a Greenpeace flyer. The Giro

di Tonno flyer was glossy with nostalgic images of the famous mattanza, plates of tuna,

fishermen carrying nets, and beautiful beaches. The flyer drew on idyllic seascapes and a

traditional local fishing culture. In contrast, the Greenpeace flyer (fig. 4.4) provocatively told

the story of the decline of tuna in the Mediterranean and the transformation of the tonnara

from a traditional fishery to a modern and destructive system that uses sea cages to transfer

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tuna to fattening ranches in Malta .

And so, on my second day I encountered the first sign of conflict stemming from the

introduction of the sea cage a few years back. The sea cage replaced the local harvest and

thus reduced local trade by redirecting tuna to Malta. After the point of capture, tuna travel in

sea cages to ranches in Malta where they stay for between three to six months and are fed on

a diet of small fish to increase fat content, size and therefore value. This was an issue I would

hear about frequently from locals and tourists alike, and it is an issue I give a lot of attention

to in the remainder of this thesis.

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