Fly fishing in the Italian Alps, part 4: Nude beaches and remote reaches

Welcome to new grads from the Fall Term of PCC's fly fishing course! Our latest cohort spent last week soaking up all they could around fly fishing, tied a few knots, made some casts, and caught fish.

Here, 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, this time heading up to Piemonte, the heartland of the Italian alps. 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, and part 3, searching for marble trout in the Passer river near the town of Merano.

A few readers have been in touch to ask about packing and planning gear for an international trip, so I'm going to talk about what I brought, what I didn't bring, and what I wished I had brought in next week's letter.

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!

We spent about a week in the Piemonte region, embracing summer life in a small village in the Sesia valley. If you've seen the film The Eight Mountains (Otto Montagne) or read the book, or followed the videos of YouTuber Martijn Doolaard as he does some mountain DIY you have a sense of the terrain, which differs significantly from the Dolomites.

The Sesia valley offers access to two of Italy’s finest fly fishing rivers: the Sesia and the Mastallone.

Across every stop on our trip, one thing was clear: we could spend weeks and weeks here, and there would still be much more to uncover. This was especially true with fishing in the Sesia valley. I could probably have spend a month, fishing daily, and only then come to terms with what the area had to offer. Have a look at the waters listed by the local fishing association to see what's there.

Sessions on the Sesia

We were staying just outside of the little town of Varallo, with some 7,000 inhabitants. It had everything an angler needs for a home base to explore the two main rivers in the area. (Those needs are: a trout stream running through town, a farmer's market, a few nice cafes, a hardware store with an entire floor of brush-clearing apparatus, and a great cobbler who'll repair the flopping soles on your poorly-designed, need-to-be-retired-but-not-yet Patagonia Riverwalkers in just a day.)

Each river has slightly different characteristics; the Mastallone hides itself, curving deeply through ancient valleys, while the Sesia takes the brunt of the water coming off the mountain, with little to conceal. Both have many fishable stretches, from the stocked reserves and private sections, to the more difficult-to-reach areas where wild fish swim free.

The Sesia river heads in the glaciers of the Monte Rosa mountain zone at the Swiss border, and, picking up steam as it passes the ski town of Alagna Valsesia and down through Varallo, ultimately feeds the Po, Italy's longest river.

The Sesia has great fly fishing throughout, with several protected stretches, and is joined just above Varallo by the Mighty Mastallone, classified as torrente because of its seasonality. Rivers (fiumi) are forever, and contain sediment. Torrenti are seasonal, and can be scrubbed clean by the spring rush and go dry in the summertime.

Torrente Mastallone

An early outing of the trip found me in a dream state. I was fighting the wickedest effects of jetlag on a morning trip to the upper Torrente Mastallone. Here, with many tiny pockets and runs amid massive boulders, we found fish happy to eat dry flies.

These small wild browns could not be picky in their tiny ecosystem, and I reverted to the most fundamental fly combo I’ve ever used, with a dry fly leader and a Parachute Adams. I'd fished this in every sort of physical abnormality, drunk or sober, wasted with exhaustion or, in this case, a strange semi-sleeplessness. In my altered state I picked my way up the gorge, breathing deeply of the humid air, scented with new and novel plant smells. I imagined what fly selection Jack Hemingway would have had on his furtive fishing missions. Would he have packed a parachute Adams on his famous parachute fly fishing missions? Would his predecessor, Nick Adams, have, on his trip to the Big Two-Hearted after wounds sustained on this, another peninsula, so far away, a hundred years ago? Probably so.

As we climbed higher and the river cut deeper into the mountainside, stately homes and farmsteads grew rarer, the boulders became more impassible. Soon, stepping gave way to scrambling, and full-body hoisting, to prevent spoiling the pools below. Mike, our friend who lives local to the area, introduced me to stinging nettle, from a distance, and I found myself clocking large patches of it on either side of the river. So this was why the pressure here was low.

At one point Mike called out to me. He had found an entire pool of fish, off the river by a good six feet, that were stranded by dropping water. They were the largest browns we had seen that day, and nearly expired, given their torpor. We scooped up as many as we could with our nets, blocking and tackling, tickling a few others, moving them back to the safety of the main river. We made a silent wish the rain would soon come and free the rest.

A few days later we fished a lower part of the Mastallone, a stretch below private club water, "Riserva La Selva". Again, with an early start, again with a half-awake cafe owner scrawling out our permits, but this time a few other anglers, two Germans by the looks of them. We shared the stretch, but only encountered them once, around midday, where we passed silently along the riverside. They worked down, while we worked up.

I began to get better at seeing fish, but never as good as Mike, who had a knack for spotting and catching big fish in slight, clear water. His use of a soft NZ wool suspender made his landings a lot quieter than my foam Airlock indicator. I found it would take a good deal of stealth to get close enough to large fish in such shallow water to use tight-line methods, whereas Mike was able to approach from further away. Those few extra feet made the difference.

My bug research before the trip had been light, and information on hatches hard to find, so I didn’t think to bring any stoneflies. But here I found evidence of their existence, in their old nymphal husks. The sole golden stone nymph that rides in my main dry-nymph box got some run, and produced a few fish. So too did a streamer, the only one of the trip that I’d wind up fishing, through a complex set of current in a pool where fish stacked up.

It was around lunchtime and a group of teenage girls hung back until we moved through the pool, then set up to swim, sunbathe, and chat.

We kept moving up, fishing a few more pools, then I went home and changed into swim trunks and came back with the rest of the family to lounge, diving below the large natural chute that stymied the trout trying to move further up the river, peering into their world.

The Nudist Hole

I hadn't fished a nude beach before. I had floated through one: the Red Rocks section of the Blackfoot in Montana, where Chris Stroup, my longtime guide pal, would always stories about the clients who were scandalized when they rounded the corner and saw folks in their birthday suits.

On the Sesia, we started at the crack of dawn, before, as Mike suggested, there were too many backside cracks present. If the fishing was good in the stretch, a few naked folks didn't bother me, I told Mike, reminding him of Portland's classic World Naked Bike Ride.

In the back of my mind, though, I thought, Will I need to 'when in Rome' this one, literally? There were barbeque grills, and a bocce court, and all the accoutrements necessary for a nice party by the river. They even had CCTV, presumably to monitor the banner stipulating "solo bella gente". Beautiful people only. Could I pass this test? Who judged?

Gentle reader, if pressed, I would have doffed everything to fish this stretch. (After all, we were already under barbless hook regulations, what's the worst that could happen?) There were wall-to-wall chunky rainbows in the 20" realm, very high-quality, hard-fighting healthy fish.

I landed my first two on flies swung through a riffle, chatted with another angler that arrived, then moved up to an area where a deep pool surrounded a massive boulder where the river dumped after a bend and a riffle.

Here, we could see numerous large fish in and around the boulder, and dialing in our depth was the only barrier to connecting with these stout fellows. A few of the first fish I connected with were harried by a big brown, in the 30" territory, as they crossed through its territory, running to hide in the depths of the boulder. I was somewhat blinded by the fish above the boulder—after all, I could see them—and stayed there. I worked that pool until my wrist throbbed, pressing my 10' 3 weight to the limit.

But then, the other angler from down the river arrived, and after a few swings of a streamer through the area behind the boulder he was tight with the brown.

Then, something special happened, something that gave me my first impression of the ethic and responsibility I'd see from Italian anglers throughout the trip. The fellow, without any hooting and hollering, without any delay, landed and released a massive fish. He didn't overplay it. He wasn't on a huge rod; maybe a 5 weight. He didn't hang out with it for a photoshoot once it was landed. He checked it out, and let it go. In total, the fish was probably in the net for thirty seconds, tops. I tried to move down to offer to take his photo with the fish, but it was already gone. No need for the Insta-glory. No need to let everyone know. It was between him and the fish.

I probably should be more upset with myself that I didn't immediately switch to the streamer, and go for the bigger brown, but the sporting ethic on display made me confident that if I really wanted to fish to that fish, it would still be lurking there and ready to eat again before too long.

We moved upstream, and eventually headed home for a late lunch. Later that day we would fish a stretch higher up, and again the only angler we encountered was courteous, generous with his knowledge, and a master of the craft.

Sure, a side product of the permit fee on this stretch, but still, quite the way to be.

I'd love to know:

• Have you fished in Italy?
• Seen any great sporting ethic on the river lately?
• Reply, or let me know in the comments.