Favignana's quarrymen were called pirriaturi, from the Sicilian pirrera, the quarry. They worked by hand, with picks and saws, following the rhythm of the stone: first the block's perimeter was cut, then it was detached from the rock bed, finally hoisted to the surface. Brutally hard work, handed down from father to son, that took years to learn.
Between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Favignana's tufa became an industry: blocks left the port for Trapani, Palermo and above all for Tunisia and Libya, where the stone of the Egadi built entire neighbourhoods. The quarries sank ever deeper, creating the lunar landscape you can admire today at Cala Rossa and Bue Marino.
Then, after the war, cement made tufa uncompetitive and the quarries closed one after another. But the islanders did something unexpected: instead of abandoning those hollows, they inhabited them. In the disused quarries, sheltered from the wind and with a more humid microclimate, the sunken gardens were born: citrus groves, vegetable gardens and orchards planted below ground level, between walls of golden stone.