Francesco Zizzo
Francesco Zizzo was born in 1961, the year the Solanto tuna fishery closed, into a family of fishermen. He started fishing at eight, on the day he finished the third year of primary school, and fished until he was thirty-six. For years he represented small-scale fishermen in their associations; today he collects data on catches and boat costs for two cooperatives, and paints panels with fishing scenes. I photographed him on 25 August 2025 in Porticello, a fishing village in Santa Flavia, first at the café, where everyone stopped to greet him, then at the harbour. It was during Noemi Armanio's fieldwork for her master's thesis in cultural anthropology at the University of Bologna, on the christening of boats and on carts in Tyrrhenian Sicily.
‘For us, the boat is everything,’ says Francesco Zizzo. Asking a fisherman what his boat means is like asking a farmer what the land means. When a new boat went into the water it was christened: the image of the saint on the bow, sweets for the whole village. There were no guests, because everyone was a guest.
‘I was born, and the tuna fishery closed.’
The patron saint of Porticello's fishermen is the Madonna del Lume. Her feast falls on the first Sunday of October: the painting is passed down from hand to hand, then the boats sail in pilgrimage to the chapel on Capo Zafferano, the landmark that guided them home from the sea. In the 1980s the harbour held four hundred boats; today there are half as many, and the young no longer go to sea.
August 2025, Porticello.
All images © Alessandro Criscuolo
The people portrayed have consented to publication.
