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 protectingrecent scientific studies backing up his approach, however, Fanciulli has never received any government funding.
“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.”
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.
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 brokenstems and the havoc wreaked by bottom trawlers.
WiredUK I had to look at the photo awhile before seeing the face.