Panino con Tonno di Favignana

Until 2007 a net the size of a small village was staked into the sea off Favignana every spring, and the tuna that swam into its last chamber, the camera della morte, were the reason this sandwich exists at all. The panino con tonno di Favignana is built from that catch, cured under oil rather than eaten fresh, and it treats the fish less like seafood than like a cured meat: a whole cut set on plain bread and left alone. The bread is a crusted rosetta or any unsalted roll with enough structure to hold the oil without dissolving. Nothing is chopped, minced, or bound with mayonnaise. The tuna arrives in a slab, and the slab is what the whole sandwich is priced and judged on.

What the sandwich actually serves is a cut hierarchy that a home cook rarely gets to choose from. The prized piece is the ventresca, the belly, taken from the softest, most heavily marbled part of the fish; laid on bread it is pale, almost translucent at the edges, and closer in texture to a good piece of foie gras than to the grey, tight-grained tuna sold flaked in a small tin. One grade back sits the tarantello, the strip just behind the belly, still fatty but firmer, with more resistance in the bite and a slightly more concentrated flavor. A sandwich built on the tonno di Favignana is a sandwich built on knowing which of those two you were handed, because a kitchen that flakes either one into a paste has thrown away the reason to seek out this fish instead of the tin at the base of any pantry.

Lay a knife flat against a piece of good ventresca and it barely resists; the fat separates along its own grain lines before the blade finishes the cut. Set on the roll, the slab holds its shape for a moment and then slumps slightly under its own weight, the oil beading at the edge and soaking a half-inch rim of crust dark. It is silent in a way ordinary tinned tuna is not, no dry crumbling, no give of packed flake against the tooth. The bite is soft first, then fatty, then a short clean run of salt low in the mouth, and it disappears well before the bread underneath has had time to turn soft all the way through.

The oil is doing real work and is not an afterthought. Good Favignana tuna is packed in olive oil chosen to carry the fat rather than mask it, and that same oil, tipped straight from the tin onto the roll, is usually the only dressing the sandwich gets. A squeeze of lemon shows up in some kitchens to cut the richness; capers or thin-sliced red onion get added in others, mostly where the tuna on hand is a lesser grade and needs a partner to distract from it. The better the piece of ventresca, the shorter that list gets, until in the best versions it disappears to bread, fish, and the oil the fish came packed in.

Bluefin numbers in the Mediterranean fell hard through the 1990s and 2000s, squeezed by boats working the fish further out in the Atlantic before it ever reached the trap, and the volume the Favignana fishery could still take shrank with them. A sandwich that in an earlier generation ran on tuna caught a few hundred meters offshore now runs, more often than not, on tuna canned from bluefin caught elsewhere and packed by companies that still use the Favignana name and the old belly-cut grading. The sandwich is unchanged; what changed is how far the fish inside it actually traveled to reach the tin.

Origin and history

On 7 March 1874, the marquises who held Favignana and the smaller Egadi islands sold them outright to Ignazio Florio, a Palermo shipping and trading magnate, for a price recorded at roughly 2.7 million lire. Florio inherited a tonnara that had worked the same fixed-net system, refined across the centuries the islands had passed through Arab, Norman, and Spanish hands, but he brought an industrial ambition the old leaseholders never had. He commissioned the architect Giuseppe Damiani Almeyda to expand the tonnara into a purpose-built cannery, and he introduced a method that had barely existed in Sicily before: boiling the tuna, packing it in oil rather than salt, and sealing it into sterilized tin cans for sale across Italy and beyond.

The cannery reshaped the island around it. At its peak the Florio plant pulled as many as 800 workers a day through its gates, on an island whose year-round population ran only to a few thousand, with women hired specifically for the cleaning and packing lines inside a complex the workers called the camparia. Every spring the mattanza itself ran on older grammar still: a rais, a title carried down from Arabic, called the strategy and set the rhythm with the cialome, the work chants the crews rowed and hauled to as the net's last chamber closed around the school. The catch that came off those boats was, within hours, the raw material on the cannery floor a few hundred meters away.

The Florio family lost control of the plant to the Parodi family in 1937, and the tonnara kept running under new owners until 1977, its output increasingly squeezed by falling catch numbers as Atlantic fleets intercepted the bluefin before they ever reached Sicilian waters. The trap was set again intermittently into the 2000s under a rais named Gioacchino Cataldo, who had led the crews since 1996, and on 9 June 2007 his boats hauled the last mattanza run in Favignana's water. No trap has been staked there since. The rope and iron of that final net now sit inside the Museo della Mattanza, opened in the old Florio cannery in 2010, on the same stretch of coast where the tuna used to arrive still moving.