Paolo Fanciulli

House of Fish

Meet Paolo Fanciulli, a 62 year old Italian fisherman in the Tuscan seaside town of Talamone, who created an underwater sculpture gallery to protect his beloved coastline from the devastating impact of illegal fishing.

Paolo always loved the sea. Growing up he was fascinated by underwater shipwrecks, especially the fish and algae that lived in them, so it was no surprise when, at 13 years old, Paolo started working as a fisherman and spent the next few decades cruising around his idyllic patch of the Mediterranean in his small boat, the ‘Sirena’.

In the 1980s however, he noticed a change. Illegal trawlers were dragging weighted nets along the seafloor, destroying vast underwater meadows of seagrass that functions as a nursery for marine life. With fish stocks depleting, Paolo took matters into his own hands, pretending to be police to stop trawlers and joining activists to block a commercial port in Tuscany.

In 2006 Paolo and local authorities hatched a plan to drop concrete bollards in the sea to snag the trawling nets. The idea was solid, but Paolo knew something was missing. Remembering the beauty of the underwater shipwrecks he loved as a boy, Paolo wondered, what if instead of dropping blocks of concrete into the sea, he dropped art?

He approached the quarry in Carrara where Michelangelo sourced his marble, to donate two marble blocks for sculptures. The quarry donated 100 blocks. Word quickly spread about Paolo’s mission and successful artists signed up. In 2013, the 'House of Fish' sculpture park was officially launched with a total of 39 algae-covered sculptures currently on the seabed, and 12 more in the works. Illegal trawling has completely halted in the area and all forms of marine life are slowly returning.

Paolo is now on a mission to expand his gallery and protect more of the coastline. “If the sea dies, so does the fisherman. You can’t just take, you have to give too.”