To facilitate the recovery of marine resources and to rebuild ecosystems, the Italian government has recently adopted a series of management measures, which included; (i) freezing the number of fishing licenses, (ii) declaring closed fishing seasons, (iii) implementing seasonal trawl spatial and temporal closures, (iv) banning harmful fishing gear (e.g., drifting gillnets fishery in the Adriatic Sea since 2003) and (v) protecting juveniles (minimum size for several target species)