Stintino · old town
Museum of the Tuna Fisheries (MuT)
The memory of Stintino's bluefin tuna fishing
✽ 10 minutes on foot from the villa
The Stintino Tuna Museum, also known as the MuT, is one of Sardinia's most interesting ethno-anthropological museums. Housed in the carefully restored old MaTer building (former Tobacco Factory) in the village's old town, it gathers and preserves the memory of an ancient trade that shaped Stintino for centuries: bluefin tuna fishing with the fixed tonnara. Until the 1980s, Stintino's fishermen set their nets in the waters off Capo Falcone and Punta Negra, waiting for the tuna shoals to enter during the spring migration from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. A story of hard work, solidarity and ritual that the museum tells in all its intensity.
Bluefin tuna fishing
The fixed tonnara — a technique of Arab origin that spread through the Mediterranean from the 10th century onwards — is a complex structure of nets anchored to the seabed which funnels the tuna into a series of ever smaller chambers, down to the last, known as the "chamber of death". Every spring, when the bluefin tuna migrated to their spawning grounds, Stintino's tonnaroti lowered more than twenty kilometres of nets, hundreds of anchors and thousands of floats into the sea: work that occupied dozens of men for weeks. The rais, the acknowledged head of the tonnara, read the sea and decided when it was time to "raise" — that is, close the nets and proceed with the catch. The museum retraces every step through original tools, scale models of the boats (the vascello, the bastardo, the palischermi) and the maps of the net layouts used in the last decades of activity.
The mattanza: work and ritual
The mattanza — from the Spanish word for "slaughter" — was the final act of the fishing: when the nets were full, the tonnaroti closed the chamber of death and slowly hauled up the bottom. The tuna, powerful animals that can exceed two hundred kilos, surfaced into an increasingly narrow space until the men captured them with long harpoons. It was extremely hard and dangerous work, accompanied by choral chants in the Stintino dialect — as old as the Arabs who taught them, handed down from father to son — which served to set the rhythms, keep the crews together and, it was said, soothe the sea. The museum devotes an entire room to archive films from the 1970s and 80s, with images of the mattanza and interviews with the fishermen: it is the most moving part of the visit.
Practical information
The MuT is located in via Lepanto, in Stintino's old town, ten minutes on foot from the villa. Summer hours (July–September): every day 10:00–13:00 and 18:00–24:00. Off-season hours: contact the museum, with reduced opening. Ticket: €5 full price, €3 reduced (children 6–14, over-65s, groups), free for under-sixes. The visit lasts about an hour and is fully bilingual Italian–English, with panels also in French and German. The museum is accessible to people with reduced mobility (internal lift). Our tip is to visit it in the middle of the day or in the evening: on hot August days it is the best way to spend a couple of hours out of the sun. Inside there's also a bookshop with local-history volumes and souvenirs.