Bue Marino cove, on the east side of Favignana, an island just off the west coast of Sicily, may be the most spectacular swimming spot on an island of spectacular swimming spots.
The sea proceeds along a beige cliff so chipped and cubed that it looks like a giant took a chisel to the coast. The water is a kaleidoscope of blue, with two colors dominating — cobalt over the meadows of sea grass undulating in the current, and ice-blue above the long strips of white sand. And somewhere just down the coast, I’d been told, there was a hidden maze of man-made caverns, “like a temple.”
So I was swimming in search of the vaults, watching the high cliffs slope closer to the sea and the sailboats and tour boats gliding by. After a quarter mile, I saw a dark entrance about two stories high, divided by a column. I climbed onto a stone landing and entered a labyrinth of chambers the size of warehouses, hollowed over the centuries by stonecutters extracting countless blocks of limestone-like rock called calcarenite. The soft dirt floor descended into more dim, empty halls, reminding me of the tombs of the pharaohs in Egypt. Instead of hieroglyphics, the walls were covered in scars from pickaxes and disc saws.
Popular with Italians but little known by foreigners, Favignana is a mostly flat, jagged island with three hallmarks: swimming, stone and tuna.
Now the massive tuna factory is an inventive museum, some of the 200 former quarries have been transformed into a botanical garden, and marble streets once trodden by exhausted laborers are alive with deeply tanned, stylishly dressed Italians on vacation.
Shaped like a butterfly and less than six miles long, the island is a 30-minute ferry ride from the port of Trapani, about 70 miles west of Palermo. In the main town, the lanes and plazas around the port are brimming with sidewalk eateries, bicycle rental shops and low-slung buildings made from the white stone locals call tufo. There are no massive resorts or thumping bars, or touts trying to steer you into restaurants and shops. It’s popular with families, ideal for cycling, and pleasantly crowded in the peak summer months of July and August.
Favignana is one of three main islands in the Egadi archipelago (along with Levanzo and Marettimo) — noted as the site of the final battle in the First Punic War in 241 B.C., when Roman warships sank a Carthaginian fleet, securing Rome’s conquest of Sicily.
Now the waters are one of the largest marine protected areas in the Mediterranean, distinguished by 31,000 acres of posidonia sea grass that are helping to rejuvenate the sea. The endless tufts of tall, green swaying grass with frosted tips are one of the most astonishing aspects of the Favignana trifecta.
The Swimming
Although you can find a handful of sandy beaches, the coast is a mostly rocky, jagged hem, and the adventure is in finding a way into the sea. Be prepared for a chilly plunge; in July the water temperature was in the mid 70s. The wind shifts daily, even hourly, and a weather app will help you find calm coves — on the southwest, for example, when the wind is hitting the northeast.
Swimming over the posidonia is like flying over boundless prairies swaying in the wind. Calamoni Beach on the bottom of the island is ideal for exploring the meadows in the morning. Fuel up with an Americano at the waterside cafe, push off from a spit of sand and swim through a rocky channel, over a coral ridge and into a vast field of green.
The archipelago is known for its many caves, man-made and natural, and the best sea caves can be found on the mostly barren island of Marettimo, a half-hour ferry ride west. We joined an Egadi Discovery cruise around the islet, stopping at eight sea caves tucked into the base of soaring, rugged cliffs plunging into the glimmering azure sea. Our guide pointed out rock formations along the way shaped like a camel’s head, a smoking pipe, and with a lot of imagination, the Holy Family.
In Cala Rotonda, a little bay on the west coast of Favignana almost completely encircled by jagged bluffs, I swam in the calm, chilly water over a white sand floor and past a dozen anchored sailboats. On the right side of the craggy rim, I found a grotto tucked under the low cliff, its slanted opening beckoning. I swam over angular slabs of rock into the shade. It was only about 10 yards to the back, where smaller dark rocks glowed with flecks of neon green and purple. I turned around to a burst of bright white and blue, and swam out to the pebbled beach shivering.
Up on the cliff a warming shot of amaro herbal liqueur and a Messina beer awaited at PuraVida, a wooden bungalow that serves an excellent fresh tuna salad and a frozen lemon-almond-anise drink. A soft breeze billowed the curtains, as accordion music blended with Italian chatter and the sound of beachgoers crunching over pebbles in the bright sun.
The Tuna
Although there was evidence of a tuna fishery on the island as early as the 13th century, the height of the industry came after the Florio family of Palermo bought the entire archipelago in 1874. The Florios, led by Ignazio Sr., are credited with the innovation of preserving tuna in oil sealed in tin cans, opening it up for export.
The Florios’ crowning structure is the massive complex with three red brick smokestacks looming over the port billed as once “the largest fish-preserving plant in the Mediterranean.” It is now a government-run museum.
In a former salt storehouse, a grainy documentary shot between 1924 and 1931 shows the centuries-old ritual called mattanza, in which schools of giant migrating tuna were caught in a system of nets suspended in the sea, and then the frenzied, brutal slaughter of the fish. Flat-bottomed boats 75-feet-long bob on the edges of the final section of rope. Brawny locals draw in the net filled with thrashing tuna. One monster fish judders erect against the side of a boat as half a dozen fishermen hook it with harpoons and strain to drag it into the hull.
The tonnara, as the tuna factory is called, closed in the 1970s, and the last mattanza was in 2007.
But tuna is still caught in the Tyrrhenian Sea and it’s on the menu of just about every restaurant on the island. It was all delicious — seared tuna steak with pistachio pesto at Quello che c’è c’è in the town center (followed by homemade amaro infused with island fennel); tuna meatballs in red sauce at La Costa overlooking the sea on the southeast coast; a platter of tuna salami, tuna belly ham, tuna eggs and more at Arsura Spiriti Isolani off Piazza Europa (with Trapani rosé); tuna kebabs at Kebabberia di Tonno with seared chunks, caramelized onion, pistachio and tomato pesto in a buttery Sicilian bun. (Our only dinner sans tuna was in the countryside east of town at Giardino Sottosale on a patio with a view of the castle shrouded by clouds atop Santa Caterina. The fabulous menu included a raw sea bass starter with lemon, almond milk, onion and fennel.)
Cycling around the wild east half of the island, we coasted on paved lanes and rattled over rocky paths, as cactus, olive trees and goldenrod reached into the roadways. At times, the only sounds were the wind breathing through canopies of sand pines and sea gulls laughing.
Everywhere, we were surrounded by calcarenite, which was used to build the stone walls, the homes, the businesses, the churches.
Since at least Roman times, stonecutters hacked out blocks of the stone, cleaving out open pits and horizontal caverns. The east side of the island has most of the 200 quarries. Some are like open-air theaters with sheer walls. Some are fragmented with steps and staircases to nowhere. Some are so vast, it’s like looking at rows of eight-story apartment towers built into the side of a cliff.
To hear the stones sing and walk inside quarries filled with flora from across the world, we visited the Garden of the Impossible. The owners have turned a dozen surface-pit quarries into a sprawling open-air museum, home to nearly 500 plant varieties, from Aleppo pines to Arizona cypress, from Mexican agave to Peruvian oleander.
A self-guided audio tour invited us to slap a calcarenite stone that sits atop a short pyramid of rectangular blocks in one of the quarries. We heard a dull ring. “It is the sound that used to inform a stonecutter that he had found the higher-quality stone,” the narrator said.
In the largest cave in the garden, the worlds of tufo and tuna converged. There was no one around in the late afternoon. The sunlight slanted inside the cave, lighting up a wall displaying pickaxes from the late 1800s. You could imagine the sound of the metal striking the rock, the fragments flying and stinging the sweat-drenched stonecutters. The thick walls created a palpable hush.
“Look up now,” the narrator said. Scars on the ceiling of the grotto formed a grid of 6-inch by 6-inch squares called rosasi. The blocks were cut out and used to anchor the fish nets to the bottom of the sea during the mattanza. The rosasi were obsolete after the Florios purchased the islands and started using small anchors made of cast iron from the family’s foundry in Palermo.
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