The Florio Cannery: Favignana jewel of industrial archeology

To fully understand the recent past of Favignana and Egadi islands, the former Florio cannery is a must. There are those who rightly called this a jewel of industrial archeology. In fact the equipment and vessels employed in the slaughter of tuna were housed here and the tuna meat was canned on site. The tuna canning industry flourished from 1859 when the Genovese Giulio Drago began the activity and continued until the ’70s only to be superseded when the market began to favour other areas and more advanced processing techniques. In truth the epic Florio family was the architect of one of the first infrastructures which turned the mattanza into a major tuna industry. For decades after the cessation of activities, the cannery saw a progressive decline and was finally abandoned. In the last decade the Region of Sicily took charge of restructuring and beautifully restoring the building transforming it into a giant marine museum, indeed the biggest in Europe.