In Sicilian, Li Manu means the hands. Li Manu takes us into an encounter with men whose long lives have been shaped by the labor of working stone in Sicily. Stonework was not merely an occupation, but a structuring element of everyday life. Daily engagement with weight, resistance, and material endurance shaped these men’s sense of self, grounding identity in physical competence, perseverance, and skill. The traces left in stone are inseparable from those inscribed on the body, bearing witness to a sustained dialogue between human effort and material constraint.

Beyond the individual, stonework constituted a social and cultural infrastructure. Building was a collective act that bound men, women, and families to place, to shared rhythms of labor, and to inherited forms of life. As these practitioners age, their gestures and memories face erasure, risking the loss of a way of knowing rooted in material practice. This work attends to that fragile threshold, framing manual stone labor as a form of cultural memory in which work, identity, and community are fundamentally intertwined.

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Collaboration: Videographer Bob Beck