to leave the caves and use them for the cattle, while a lot of trees were cut down to provide land for farming. Marettimo, the most far and rocky island of the Egadi, was exploited above all by the carpenters.
During the Risorgimento the Egadi received hundreds of rebels send in exile or confined in the dismal cells of the fortresses and the prisons. Marettimo too was populated with deportees, enclosed in the water cistern dug at the foot of the castle of Punta Troia. It was closed in 1844 according to king Ferdinand II's will.
From 1860, after the expedition of the Thousand, the islanders knew a period of peace and welfare, interrupted by the war of 1915-'18, where the inhabitants of Marettimo too died for the recently united Italy. The list of the dead grew longer with the second world war, during which many inhabitants of Favignana died also under air raids.
At the end of the war the Egadi had a short period of economic recovery, until the sad phenomenon of emigration began. It came to a standstill only in the last years thanks also to the tourism, that however has not damaged the ancient and wild beauty of these islands.
The secret of Marettimo and of the Egadi, exact centre of the Mediterranean Sea, lands of passage and conquest, is still to discover in the culture and the traditions of the islanders and in their ancestral link with fishing and the sea
