The island of Procida, easily reached by hydrofoil from Naples, is now home to friends who moved from Venice. I spent a very pleasant few hours here with them and other friends from Australia. We explored a tiny corner of this colourful, hilly island, and had a delicious lunch at the waterfront.
Fishing is the main industry on Procida, as is evidenced by the many boats moored in the harbour and the piles of fishing nets.
The latter caught my eyes, with the complexity of the knots that make up these tools of the trade.
The different coloured cord gives evidence of repair work on these particular nets.
And, here are a couple of the men who keep the nets ready for the task for which they’re designed. I don’t think they’ll ever lack for work, as long as there are fish to be caught. I wonder if some of the younger men are learning this skill, to take over when these men can no longer do it?
Edited to add a link to net making video: https://youtu.be/CZfWCyv1eFo
Hello World 
Yvonne, I hope Karen and Mike are settling in OK, I think I upset Karen last year when my wife sprung a last minute trip to Capri on me, so we had to miss them.
TBH Venice wasn’t the same without them, Karen’s huge grin and Mike’s grumpy stories always made it special for us.
Rob
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I think they’re quite settled in, and feel like they are part of a community. Karen and Mike are still grinning and curmudgeonly! 🙂
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It is a real joy to see old trades that have stayed on into a modern world.
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Absolutely. Yesterday, I was saddened to see that progress has replaced the brooms used to keep street clean in Naples, with noisy, polluting leaf blowers. 😕
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I Haaaaate those things.
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Same here! Lucky they don’t have much/any grass to cut in these cites, can you imagine the ride-on mowers at work!
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The photos are works of art themselves.
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Please, I can’t even sew a button back on, so to me, net making seems like an impossible task. Very impressive and I love the colors – quite pretty. How was Procida? Do the Venetian transplants like it there? Must be nice and quiet after the masses in Venice…but still with the water. For me, it’s all about the water. xx
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Yes, they seem to have settled in well, and like their community. The fly in the ointment is the wheeled traffic on very narrow streets, but the upside is very few tourists, aside from those from other parts of Italy.
PS I don’t like sewing on buttons either. ❤
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May I reassure the readers that I, still to this day, fix the holes in my own socks.
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Same here, Gez. I knit my own winter socks and enjoy the simple task of darning. I have kept an old fashioned light globe for that very purpose, they work just right to form the basis of a mended heel.
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For your younger readers, I’ll explain that ‘darning’ means repairing. As far as I know, the word is only used for the repair of socks. I’ve never heard of anyone darning a shirt or a pullover. But perhaps if you had a woolen pullover that had worn through at the elbow, you might have darned the hole. Today, of course, you’d throw it away, as with socks. To darn socks you would use a wooden device in the shape of a mushroom, called a ‘darning mushroom’. It seems that they are still available, but I can’t imagine that many are sold.
I would think think that nets are now made by machines, though I have difficulty imagining how a machine could tie a knot, but repairs would have to be done by hand. But just imagine making a fishing net by hand, before machines could do it!
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I haven’t got one of the darning mushrooms/eggs, I have just kept a burnt out light globe. And, people still darn socks and other knitted garments, it seems: https://www.liveabout.com/how-to-darn-a-sock-1106645 Maybe we’ll start a whole new home craft among our “younger” readers!
Some of the nets were made of very fine yarn, they’d have to have been machine made. Now, where would fishing nets be made?
I just found a lot of information online about making nets, here’s a short answer to your question “Fishing nets are usually manufactured on industrial weaving machines, though traditional methods are still used where the nets are manually weaved and assembled in home or cottage industries.”
PS I did find a heap of videos, here’s one: https://youtu.be/CZfWCyv1eFo
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Do people still make these nets by hand? That would be astonishing, given their size…I can see repairing by hand, but making one’s own would be a bit like weaving one’s own bed sheets…they are beautiful, by the way, with the colors…
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The colours surprised me, and the detail of their structure fascinated me. I’d never paid much attention to fishing nets before.
I did an online search for the manufacture of nets these days, in summary: “Fishing nets are usually manufactured on industrial weaving machines, though traditional methods are still used where the nets are manually weaved and assembled in home or cottage industries.” There was a photo of a Syrian refugee in Lebanon, making fishing nets to sell.
Oh, look: https://youtu.be/n15hulIg594
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What a lot of patience it must take to work on one of these nets. I hope the men are passing on their knowledge to someone younger.
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Watching a man making nets was the entertainment during an interesting lunch in November at a waterfront osterie, possibly the one where you ate. There was a cat supervising to add to our enjoyment, and we tried riso di venere for the first time. What was not so entertaining was very nearly getting stuck on the island overnight due to foul weather!
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Yes, the begging cats were still there, Victoria. They seem to have a rather good life style!
That is one if the downsides to living on Procida, when the sea says “No”, the boats don’t run.
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Do you ever see any younger people mending nets? I’m guessing not and that like many other skills, this is falling by the wayside.
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Beautifully colourful. Were the nets nylon? If so it would take away some of the ancient-icity of the net menders… A wonderful skill nonetheless.
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Some of the nets seemed to be nylon, others were a more natural fibre.
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Ancient-icity, I rather like that.
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The nets make a colourful and intricate subject. Well done.
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Hi, Derrick. The whole island is very colourful and interesting.
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I did examine the nets closely to make sure they weren’t rolled up in their work.
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Thanks for pointing out that dear old WordPress “disappeared” the men. I’ll restore them to their place in the sun.
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Ah, there they are, but it doesn’t look very sunny.
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There were patches of sunshine, the rays were very shy.
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I’ve heard tales of women who could darn socks so that you couldn’t see where the hole had been. But invisible men mending nets is a new one for me. Or maybe I misread and there isn’t a pic of men mending nets!😱😵
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Gone are the days when we darned socks, it seems. Did you learn how to do this in Home Ec at school?
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No, they were no longer teaching darning of socks as a necessary skill in the mid 60’s, although I did catch my mother-in-law darning her knee high nylon stockings!
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The hours our elders spent darning, tatting, embroidering, etc. are now the hours we spend clacking away at a keyboard. Even letter writing is a lost art for most of us, ~sigh~ and soon artificial intelligence will do that for us too. Just think, if these guys didn’t have to mend nets, they could be blogging, or mountain biking!
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I’m going back and tell them what you suggested, Judy! 🙂
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