Fly-Fishing in the Italian Alps, Part 3: Young marble giants
Searching for slabs on the Passer river in Südtirol / Trentino Alto-Adige, part of our five-part series on fly-fishing in Italy
Our glorious fall continues here in Oregon, and I'm sleepless off a summer steelhead session on the Deschutes, with all the zero-dark-thirty wakeups that entails. But we're continuing our recap of this summer's Italian Alps trip for another two weeks.
Let's rewind to all the prosciutto and melon, the best and the würst, continuing in the north east part of the country, Trentino-Alto Adige / Südtirol. Catch up with part 1, all about the rules and regulations around Italian fly fishing, and part 2, fishing the Ram up near the Swiss border.
n.b. If you're reading this and have expertise around fly fishing in Italy that would be helpful, or you can correct any of my likely plentiful errors, please leave a comment!
After acclimatizing in Piemonte, we swung around Milan and back up to the north east corner of Italy, home of the Dolomites and the country’s germanic population, in Südtirol / Trentino-Alto Adige.
With a few more stops to fish in that province, in between family hiking, splashing, rock climbing, fun-bobbing, and other various activities I had a tiny goal of my own: catch a marble trout.
Marble trout (salmo marmoratus in Latin, or Trota marmorata in modern Italian) are a species found solely in this corner of the globe, solely rivers that feed into the Adriatic sea. They’re only found in Italy, Slovenia, Bosnia, Croatia, Montenegro, and parts of Albania, having been considered mostly extirpated (locally extinct) from the Drin river basin, which touches parts of North Macedonia, Bosnia, and Albania.
Similar to the bull trout we have in Oregon, they’re powerfully built, with large, bullet-shaped heads, and the capacity to get quite big. Very different to bulls, though, marble trout have unique patterning on their backs and sides, a wormy, squiggly array of hypnotic lines.
I’m not a completist, or a fanatic about goals, but it felt like, hey, I’m here, so why not give it a shot. It sure would be fun to find another species of trout that doesn’t live in North America while I’m here.
Luckily, this opportunity became a reality in the region on Italy’s northeastern flank. And from my meager research, the town we were headed to, Merano, had a beat nearby on the Passer river that held marble trout.
So, next stop, our old-ass Airbnb in Merano, then onward.
