Italian fisherman Paolo Fanciulli has been fishing on the Maremma coast of Tuscany for more than 40 years. In the late 1980s, Paolo began to notice the unmistakable signs of illegal trawling.

The seabed became infertile and fish stocks were quickly depleted. The trawlers use weighted nets that they drag across the seabed, tearing away plants and marine life. They get a good catch, but destroy the seabed. Posidonia, also known as Neptune grass, is also removed, which is crucial for marine life: Animals such as lobsters and sea bream lay their eggs in it.

With his livelihood at stake, Paolo Fanciulli felt compelled to take action. And so the underwater sculpture park ‘House of the Fishes’ was born in 2013.

“They destroyed the sea and my way of life,” Fanciulli told Euronews. “When the sea dies, the fisherman dies too. You can’t just take, you also have to give.”

The practices of Fanciulli and the other local fishermen are necessarily sustainable – if they damage the ecosystem they lose their source of income.

Fanciulli started protesting against bottom trawlers near his hometown of Talamone in the late 1980s. It made him something of a local hero, but it also earned him enemies and got him blacklisted from the mafia-controlled fish markets.

Ilaria de Bernardis, a journalist who has written a book about Fanciulli, says: “This period is like a spy story, he risked his life against the illegal trawlers.” In those early days he was a lonely fisherman against a much more powerful enemy, de Bernardis explains.

However, in 2006, Fanciulli decided to work with local authorities to place concrete blocks in the sea. These act as a deterrent to illegal trawling because they entangle the nets. If the trawlers do not release the nets, their boats can sink.

The blocks were too scattered to catch the fishermen’s nets, but they gave Fanciulli an idea: “I decided to use art to stop them instead.” As de Bernardis says: “He wanted to defend beauty with beauty.”

Fanciulli contacted Franco Barattini, director of the quarry from which Michelangelo sourced his marble. Barattini donated 100 blocks of marble. Nearly half of those blocks have now been carved into statues and lowered to the seabed.

A total of 39 statues rest on the seabed today and 12 others are being worked on. Sunken statues have now been used at several coastal locations by environmentalists or authorities trying to revive a dwindling marine population. But the nonprofit association Casa dei Pesci, or House of the Fish, was the passionate project of one fisherman, determined to protect a coastline from devastating illegal fishing.

Source: Euro News, 21-03-2022