Museo della Tonnara - Stintino

In a building modelled on Stintino's low village houses, six rooms named for the tonnara's world retell the tuna fishery that shaped this Ligurian-founded shore until the 1970s: nets and tools, fishermen's diaries, canvases by Sardinian artists and an immersive mattanza chamber among the evidence.

Why it matters

Stintino's founding story is the museum's subject. The story starts in 1885, when the new Italian state installed a lazaretto and a penal colony on the island of Asinara and removed the forty-five Ligurian families living there; on the coast opposite they rebuilt their lives and carried on the trade they knew, tuna. The Saline fishery worked the gulf until the 1970s, and by then generations of the town had been fed, paid and defined by the catch. When the traps finally fell silent, that collective memory risked dissolving with them.

The Museo della Tonnara was created to hold it. The regional tourism portal records a first opening in 1995 under the title "Il ricordo della memoria", and a reopening in 2016 after renewal. The museum preserves tools, documents and images of the Tonnara Saline and is included in national and Mediterranean small-museum and maritime-museum networks.

What to notice

The building itself is the first exhibit: the regional portal notes that outside it is deliberately identical to one of the low stone houses typical of the borgo, so the museum reads as a piece of the village rather than an institution dropped into it. Inside, the itinerary runs through six rooms whose names come straight from the vocabulary of a tonnara — Camera grande, Bordonarello, Bordonaro, Bastardo, Camera di ponente and Camera della morte.

In the Camera grande, the crews' working tools are set beside comparisons from other Italian and foreign fisheries, and a faithful scale model shows the island of the Tonnara Saline, with reproductions of the fleet's barcarecci boats nearby. A 1:200 reconstruction lays out the labyrinth of a tonnara's net system so visitors can finally grasp the geometry of the trap. The Bordonarello room explains the biology of the bluefin, its Mediterranean routes and the preserving techniques that made the catch durable. The Bordonaro room carries the historical weight: the story of the gulf's fisheries and especially the Stintino Saline, told through fishermen's diaries and documents, with the roles aboard and the figure of the rais, the crew chief. The Bastardo room guards copies of early documents and images, while the Camera di ponente pairs period photographs with contemporary art, including works by the Sardinian artists Stanis Dessy, Ausonio Tanda, Nani Tedeschi and Angelo Maggi.

The last room is the one visitors remember. The Camera della morte stages the mattanza — the final kill of the tuna — as immersive theatre of projected images, light and sound, drawing on archival and modern film. The municipal visitor page adds that video material throughout the museum runs with Italian narration and English subtitles.

Context and history

A tonnara was a fixed system of nets set along the coast to intercept the tuna's spring migration, and its economy sustained whole communities around the gulf of Asinara. Stintino's own fishery, the Tonnara Saline, is the thread the museum follows; its story is documented here through the diaries of fishermen, the division of labour aboard and the mattanza that ended each season. The town's identity never quite left that world: wooden lateen-sail gozzi remain its emblem at sea, and the regional portal suggests pairing a museum visit with July's sagra del tonno, the festival that still cooks what the fishery once supplied.

As an institution, the museum began in 1995 as a deliberate act of remembrance, "Il ricordo della memoria", in a building shaped to echo the village's own architecture, and reopened in 2016 with its current layout. Its governing frame is municipal — the Comune di Stintino delegates day-to-day management to the cooperative COMES — and it holds memberships in the Associazione Nazionale Piccoli Musei, the Associazione Musei Marittimi del Mediterraneo and Simbea. Temporary art exhibitions and cultural events share the programme alongside the permanent itinerary.