This long-term reportage explores the lives of the fishermen of Mola di Bari, my hometown, documenting a profession and a cultural identity that are progressively disappearing.
Since 2022, I have worked closely alongside the fishermen who remain, spending extended periods immersed in their daily routines. Access to their boats, considered more a home than a workplace, was granted only after years of trust and mutual respect. This proximity allowed me to witness not only the demanding physical labor of bottom trawling and net mending, but also moments of solitude, camaraderie, and silent resilience that define their existence.
Economic pressures, environmental change, and increasingly restrictive European regulations have accelerated the decline of a profession that younger generations are unwilling, or unable, to continue. The fleet has shrunk. The knowledge is not being passed on. As this livelihood fades, so too does a fundamental part of the town's social fabric.
Yet Mola di Bari has been a seafaring town since the Middle Ages: a port active during the Crusades, a hub of Adriatic trade, and by the early twentieth century one of the most significant deep-sea fishing fleets in southern Italy. When commercial traffic shifted toward Bari, the fishermen of Mola didn't stop. They turned to open water, working the paranze, double-masted sailing vessels that operated in pairs, dragging trawl nets across the sea floor, and pushing as far as Tunisia, Greece, Crete, Egypt, and Palestine.
By 1916, the fleet counted nearly one hundred boats and over a thousand men, surpassing the fleets of Barletta, Trani, and Bisceglie in both tonnage and crew. Many fishermen from Mola have worked, and still work today, out of Otranto and Mazara del Vallo, the largest fishing port in the Mediterranean. The old men tell stories of how it was men from Mola who first brought bottom trawling to those Sicilian waters, where it had no prior tradition. Nobody can say for certain if it's true. But they say it with the quiet confidence of people who heard it from those who were there.
This work is part of a broader investigation into the transformation of Mola di Bari over the last two decades. Beyond documenting labor, the project reflects on the disappearance of manual work and the shift from a culture of doing to one increasingly detached from physical craft. The fishermen's lives embody a fragile balance between survival, dignity, and adaptation. Their story is one of the last threads connecting this town to what it has always been.
