Tuna fisheries involve complex tunny-capture systems made by kilometers long fixed nets and haul working plants.

There were hundreds of tuna fisheries in the Mediterranean Sea till the middle of the XX century, but today they are just about ten not only because of lack of tunas due to pollution or intensive fishing but also because market rules made this kind of fishing more and more difficult to carry on.

Sicily has just two tuna fisheries that are still hardly working: one in Bonagia, near Trapani and another one in Favignana. Even if from the Middle Ages onwards techniques and tools have remained almost the same, today tunny-fishing scenario has changed its sense, its importance and its protagonists. It was the exploitation of a very rich fish asset that could never end, profit source for whole communities which were proud of working and hand it down to posterity.

Nowadays it has turned into something different that mixes several contrasting ingredients: tourist trade, strong will to make a tradition survive, emergency job for social outcast, temporary first job for young people who have nothing in prospects.