Undersea Art Gallery That Ensnares Illegal Trawlers Favorite 

IT’S 7 AM, and a thin layer of mist still hovers over the harbor in Talamone as fisherman Paolo Fanciulli stretches out his nets. Pulling them out of a plastic tub, he examines them section by section, setting the ripped ones aside to be repaired. It’s a time-consuming process—one that’s occupied men from this tiny village on the coast of Tuscany for centuries. But in recent years, Fancuilli has spent more time working on ways to protect fish than on catching them.

The problems started, he explains, with the arrival of large-scale industrial trawlers in the 1980s. Trailing chain-weighted nets, these boats scraped the seabed bare, scooping up not just fish but all manner of plants and sea creatures. Known as “bottom trawling,” the practice is illegal within three nautical miles of Italy’s coastline, but that hasn’t stopped some unscrupulous operators from carrying on regardless.

“You see, these are like the nets the apostles used,” Fanciulli says, gesturing to his own equipment. “When you put them in the sea, the holes are big, and they only catch the adult fish,” allowing the ecosystem to thrive. “It’s sustainable fishing,” he says. By contrast, bottom trawling endangers not just the future of local fish stocks, but the existence of one of Europe’s most important carbon sinks.

Just offshore from Talamone lie large meadows of Posidonia oceania, an underwater seagrass that absorbs more carbon dioxide per hectare than the Amazon rain forest. “We used to see these big boats—always 10, 20 at once, and when they took away the seabed, they also took away the meadows of Posidonia,” says Fanciulli.

Today, the waters off Talamone are calm, and the seagrass is slowly recovering—a change that’s largely due to Fanciulli himself. After years of battling the bottom trawlers, he hit upon a solution that’s both elegant in its simplicity and beautiful to look at. Beneath the surface of the bay lie 39 sculptures made of white carrara marble. Carved by leading artists, including British sculptor Emily Young, these hulking blocks are arranged in such a way that they would snag the nets of any trawler that tried to encroach on this zone. The result is Casa dei Pesci—the home of the fish—a unique underwater art gallery that protects both the local ecosystem and the wider environment.

Since the first blocks of marble were sunk in 2015—and rapidly colonized by fish and plants— the gallery has grown steadily. Managing it and fundraising has become almost a full-time job for Fanciulli. “I am still, first and foremost, a fisherman,” he says. “But I understand that if I just take from the sea and don’t give back, I won’t be able to fish anymore.”

THE ESTABLISHMENT OF Casa dei Pesci represents the realization of a long-held dream for Fanciulli. Tall and tanned at 62, with bright blue eyes, a firm, calloused handshake, and the industrious energy of a border collie, he’s been fishing ever since he left school at 13. “I’d always loved shipwrecks and artifacts in the sea,” he says. But it was only in 2006 that he realized underwater sculptures might also serve a practical purpose. He set up Casa dei Pesci as a not-for-profit organization the following year. “I felt [the sea god] Poseidon calling me to help,” he says poetically, but when he started to explore the practicalities of his plan, he discovered science was on his side too.

“The role of seagrasses as natural climate solutions has been recognized and understood only recently,” explains Peter Macreadie, associate professor of environmental science at Deakin University in Australia. Around 10 years ago, he says, scientists working on seagrass meadows, mangrove forests, and tidal marshes coined a new term—blue carbon—to describe the disproportionally large amount of carbon that these ecosystems store. In a 2021 paper Macreadie estimated that if seagrasses were protected and restored around the world, they could draw down the equivalent of 1 percent of total global emissions each year by 2030—roughly half the output of the entire international aviation sector.

In Europe, Posidonia oceanica plays a particularly important role, says Christine Pergent-Martini, an associate professor at the University of Corsica, who specializes in coastal ecosystems. She is the lead author of a separate 2021 paper examining the plant’s potential as a carbon sink. “It’s what we call an engineer species—it provides the basis for an ecosystem with several thousand other species of mollusc, arthropod, fish, and so on,” she says. But Posidonia meadows also sit atop what is known as a matte—a mass of roots and sediment that can be up to 8 meters deep. “It’s very rich in organic matter, very rich in carbon, and it can sequester carbon for a very long time,” she says—potentially thousands of years.

While it’s not known exactly how much Posidonia oceanica grows in the Mediterranean, the most recent estimates by Pergent-Martini and her colleagues—extrapolated using a mixture of drone imagery, aerial photography, and side-scan sonar—suggest it covers around 2.3 million hectares of seabed: an area the size of Wales. The plant’s ability to absorb CO2 through photosynthesis is roughly the same as a forest, “with 5 tons of CO2 equivalent per hectare, per year,” she says. But while a typical forest would only lock away about 5 percent of this CO2 each year through sequestration, a Posidonia bed can lock in 20 to 25 percent, she says. “So the carbon sequestration is five times more important, per hectare, in a Posidonia meadow than in a forest.”

As a carbon sink, seagrass has other advantages too. It’s unlikely to catch fire and release large quantities of carbon back into the atmosphere at once, for example. But it is vulnerable to other threats. Increased coastal erosion can muddy the waters, making it more difficult for Posidonia to photosynthesize. Cruise ships dropping anchor can cause untold damage. And, of course, bottom-trawlers can ravage thousand-year-old meadows in a matter of minutes.

Drag-net trawling causes most damage to the plant itself, says José Miguel González-Correa, a professor in marine sciences at the University of Alicante, in Spain. But drag nets can easily damage the matte too, he says, causing “carbon to be released by bacterial action, and increasing CO2 levels.” Restoring Posidonia meadows can be a long process, he says. In a paper comparing trawler-damaged meadows to their healthy neighbors, he estimates they might take as much as 100 years to recover fully. Preservation, he concludes, is better than restoration, and creating anti-trawling reefs—by sinking well-spaced obstacles like Paolo Fanciulli’s Casa dei Pesci sculptures—is one of the simplest and most cost-effective ways of protecting Posidonia.

DESPITE ALL THESE recent scientific studies backing up his approach, however, Fanciulli has never received any government funding. In fact, he’s universally scathing about those in authority, lambasting the EU for its fishing subsidies, which he claims only encourage bad practices, and lampooning the local coastguard for their inability—or unwillingness—to enforce the laws against bottom trawling. “They do nothing,” he says.

On occasion in the 1990s, he said, he took it on himself to police the waters off Talamone. “The coastguard always used to use a big light on their boats, so what did I do? I put one on my boat,” he chuckles. “Think about it, three in the morning, you’re fishing illegally, you see a light coming towards you, what would you do? You'd run away.” And they did, he says, but they’d always come back—until he started sinking his statues. Casa dei Pesci has now placed enough anti-trawling obstacles to reach from Porto Santo Stefano to the Ombrone River—a distance of some 20 nautical miles, or 37 km—meaning that some 137 km2 of Posidonia meadow and fish habitat are now protected. “It’s small,” says Fanciulli. But it’s still remarkable given the lack of any official backing or funds.

“What we do here, we do entirely with the money that we raise and donations,” says Fanciulli. Early on in the project’s genesis, after sinking a few test blocks of concrete, he was lucky enough to meet the director of the Cave di Michelangelo, the quarry where the famous Florentine sculptor sourced his stone. “I asked him to give me two blocks of marble. He gave me 100.”

The sculptors, similarly, were friends of friends who offered their time to the cause for free. “Initially, there were five main artists, but the project quickly grew,” explains Giorgio Butini, an artist whose work now sits on the seabed. An established sculptor from Florence, he would normally expect to sell a comparably sized work for between €50,000 and €60,000 ($49,500–$59,500), but he has been happy to contribute several pieces. His latest, called Giovinezza (or “Youth”), is the first of a planned three-part series called Past, Present, Future that Casa dei Pesci is currently crowdfunding to put into place further up the coast—because while the sculptors might offer up their time and tools for free, moving the sculptures around isn’t cheap.

British sculptor Emily Young, arguably the best known of the artists internationally, was introduced to Fanciulli because she owns a studio nearby. Initially, she was impressed by his energy and enthusiasm. “He’s really, really focused, he’s sort of heroic. I think he sleeps almost no hours,” she says. But she was also fascinated, on an artistic level, by the gallery’s longer-term legacy and what the sculptures will say to future generations. “That’s something I think about a lot in my work. When you work with stone, you’re leaving something for the future,” she says. “We’re altering the Earth very profoundly, and some of the things we’re leaving are very destructive—but they can also be very beautiful and poignant.”

She hopes that, “in the fullness of time, people won’t even know what these sculptures were. They will be covered in plants and Posidonia—and that will be the sign that the project is working.” In the shorter term, there’s no doubt her work has helped raise the profile of Fanciulli’s cause. “Already I get emails from people saying: ‘We’re going on a dive, can you tell us more about your sculptures so we know what we’re looking at?’” says Young. And as more and more artworks have been added to the gallery, word of the project has spread. Recently, the outdoor clothing brand Patagonia decided Casa dei Pesci met its high standards for grant recipients, and awarded a grant of €13,000 ($12,800). A German charitable foundation has promised €15,000 ($14,800). But most of the money still comes from fundraisers that Fanciulli runs himself.

ON AN UNSEASONABLY warm Sunday at the end of October, Fanciulli can be found sweating through his camouflage T-shirt while he mans three BBQs at once. The previous night’s catch—amberjack, dolphin fish, some red snapper—is being grilled fresh off the boat, with a simple mix of salt and rosemary, for the 40 guests who have paid to join the fundraiser and enjoy a delicious three-course meal in the process.

Although ably assisted by his wife in the kitchen, his daughter at the tables, and a couple of friends, Fanciulli still seems to be doing everything—flipping the fish, pouring the wine, and chatting with his guests about his next initiative: a home for octopuses, made up of a gallery of hand-painted amphora—narrow Roman jars with handles and pointed bottoms. The only time he stops is to give his presentation, showing photos of broken Posidonia stems and the havoc wreaked by bottom trawlers. Seated at long tables, his guests are listening rapt as he tells them: “If you want to eat well, you have to defend the environment. It’s like a war.”

As the lunch wraps up and his guests depart, Fanciulli finally sits down. There were times over the past 30 years, he admits, where he’d felt like he was fighting a lonely, losing battle. “I’ve been threatened by trawlers, I’ve been threatened by institutions, but I always told the truth. For a long time, no one listened to me,” he says, but now, with public opinion swinging behind him, both locally and internationally, his message finally seems to be getting through.

TRISTAN KENNEDY
Wired Magazine
15.11.2022