For Alessandro Sala most days begin while the rest of Italy is still sleeping. Under a bank of stars, a canopy of clouds, or a sheet of rain, he settles into his small motorboat and maneuvers quietly out of the tiny port of San Giovanni and into the heart of Lake Como. Even in the dark, the outline of the mountains that guard the lake reminds you that it’s not far across this wishbone of water. But it is a long way down—five football fields at its center, the deepest lake in Italy.
Alessandro starts by collecting the shallowest nets, the ones he uses to catch persico, perch, best dusted in flour and pan-fried in butter. From the coastline around San Giovanni he works the boat out toward Como’s deeper reaches, where he hopes to find his nets filled with agone, freshwater shad, short and plump and swollen with fat to keep it warm so far below the surface.
He covers kilometers of Como in search of the nets, pulling them up for the better part of three hours, filling the boat with silver-green bodies that stiffen as the day grows from black to brown to gray, until the sun from behind the Grigna mountains pokes the first holes through the wall of darkness and the lake begins to reveal itself.
By the time he parks the boat and offloads the catch, the 8 A.M. bells of San Giovanni will just begin to sing their good-morning missive, setting the rest of the village’s forty-two souls in motion.
* * *
Some places stick to your bones. They burrow beneath your skin, slip silently into your marrow. You find yourself overtaken by their energy, some life-affirming magic built into its DNA. Sometimes the triumphing factors are as clear as a mountain stream (Antoni Gaudí’s genius! Kyoto’s ancient magic!), but once in a while an unknowable force wins you over, some opaque combination of light and angle, flesh and pheromones. And when it does, it has the alchemic effect of making everything feel special. Those screaming voices suddenly sound like songbirds; that run-down B&B glows with rustic charm. If you’ve traveled much, you no doubt have found a few of those places, the ones that live on as little islands of happiness in the turbulent waters of your mind.
San Giovanni is one of those towns. We came here by accident, the result of poor planning and the rest of northern Italy being overbooked. Laura and I found a room available at a hotel just above the village and wandered down for dinner, then the next morning for coffee. The church bells rang and light snaked through the narrow streets, bathing two perfect cappuccinos and two dumbstruck humans in an autumn-morning glow. We were in love.
Twice we tried to leave San Giovanni. Twice we failed.
The first time we tried to leave San Giovanni was after dinner at Ristorante Mella, a low-lit, family-run place a few steps from the water. It was a cold Tuesday night in late October, and we shared the restaurant with a young Italian-German couple and their new baby. Dinner was as simple as it was striking: whitefish, fried crisp in butter and dressed with a vibrant salsa verde, followed by a risotto of pike and autumn squash, the rice suffused with the double-edged sweetness of roasted gourd and simmered fish. I spoke with Rosy, the co-owner with her husband, for the better part of an hour about everything I could conjure up in my middling Italian: the fragrant court bouillon used to make the risotto, the types of lake fish that make a hearty ragù, the nocturnal habits of her husband the fisherman.
Alessandro works with up to a dozen specialty nets when fishing Lake Como.
Matt Goulding
The next day, we made it all the way to Verona, to a fancy pizzeria pit stop, just before heading into Venice to meet a group of fishermen from the outer islands of the sunken city. As I chewed on the yeasty, €30 crust, all I could think about was the charming little restaurant and the sparkling body of water beyond it. I excused myself from the table, walked out into the courtyard, and dialed the restaurant. Rosy picked up. “Of course. No problem. I haven’t touched the place since you left.”
I should tell you now that you won’t find much in San Giovanni. There are no general markets, no cute little shops, no wood-burning pizza ovens, no ancient salumeria with a mustachioed butcher selling suckling pig and reciting Dante. You won’t even find a place to buy a lightbulb or a head of garlic. Technically it’s a part of Bellagio, the self-proclaimed “pearl of Lake Como” found a mile down the shore, but it’s very much a village of its own—ask any of the residents, and they’ll emphatically agree that the pizzerias, souvenir shops, and glitzy hotels of its neighbor have nothing to do with life in San Giovanni. There are two small bed-and-breakfasts, a miniature museum of esoteric animal sculptures and modern art, a single café that serves coffee and croissants in the morning, wine and cheese in the early evening. A small port with generous views across the narrow lake. And there is Ristorante Mella, the only restaurant in San Giovanni and the real reason we keep coming back.
Mella is owned by Alessandro and his wife, Rosy, a couple in their late forties with deep roots in the Como area. Mella was one of Italy’s first ittiturismi, the aquatic analog of Italy’s massive agriturismo industry, a restaurant and lodging where at least 40 percent of the business comes from fishing. It is located in a small two-story building a block from the water, with a wooden sign that announces the Mella mantra: Pesce dalla rete alla padella, Fish from the net to the pan. Alessandro is the fisherman; Rosy manages the front of house and the two apartments that they rent out to visitors. It’s a small, unassuming operation but one that says as much about the greatness of Italy’s regional food culture as any of the flashier, fancier outposts of fine dining found around Lombardy.
The menu at Mella is a crash course in Como’s underwater ecosystem: persico (perch), the omnipresent whitefish of the lake; trota, brown trout that funnel into the lake from the rivers that feed it; salmerino (char), spotted and plump and ready for a sear. You won’t find any shrimp, any salmon, anything that comes from the ocean or a body of water beyond. Yes, there is a handful of meat and vegetable dishes for land lovers, but 90 percent of the menu is fish, and 100 percent of the fish served at the restaurant comes directly from Alessandro’s boat.
It was Alessandro’s catch I had on my mind the second time we tried to leave San Giovanni. We were halfway to the airport—flights purchased, car rental due back within the hour—when I pulled over on the side of the lake, turned off the car, and turned to my wife. “I can’t leave.” A look of relief broke out across her face. “Me, neither.” We flipped the script, broke plans with friends and family, and shouldered the steep cost of our spontaneity. For a few long minutes after rebooking the tickets, I felt a tinge of buyer’s remorse, but the moment we wound our way around the lake and back into the village, it dissipated like Como’s layer of morning fog. When I called Rosy, she didn’t sound surprised when I asked, “You think I could come back and spend a few days on the boat with Alessandro?”
* * *
Lake Como was formed just after the last ice age, when retreating glaciers left a long, jagged body of water in their place. One of seven lakes in Lombardy, the northern region of Italy, which ranks as the country’s wealthiest, Lake Como is smaller and deeper than Lake Garda and Lake Maggiore, the other so-called great lakes of Lombardy. From above it looks like an inverted Y. Como and Lecco, the lake’s two biggest cities, guard the southern points, with Bellagio positioned right at the vertex. The poet William Wordsworth called it “a treasure which the earth keeps to itself.” Indeed, the wall of forested mountains that surround the lake lend it an air of breathtaking isolation, which helps explain one of its most enduring characteristics: its reputation as a hideaway for the world’s rich and powerful.
Matt Goulding
For most people around the world, Lake Como is synonymous with star power. Even if they couldn’t point it out on a map or spot it in a photo, they can recite the roster of titans who have sought solace from the spotlight on its shores, people so famous they require only one name: Madonna, Ronaldinho, Versace, Branson, Clooney.
But long before the Star Wars scenes of Natalie Portman strolling the palace gardens of Villa del Balbianello, before the music videos by Gwen Stefani and John Legend, the bad-guy showdowns in Casino Royale and the Clooney-Roberts canoodling of Ocean’s 12, before Saint George purchased his lakeside villa in Laglio and created what is called by ambivalent locals the “Clooney Effect,” Lake Como was a retreat for the stars of the Roman Empire, when senators and high-ranking military officials found sanctuary along its shores. Its shimmering beauty continued to attract the elite for centuries to come, as Lake Como served as muse and refuge for writers and composers, counts and cardinals. One by one, the famous villas were constructed around the lake: Villa d’Este, once the residence of religious brass and British royalty, today one of the world’s top hotels; Villa Serbelloni, around the bend from Bellagio, home of the Rockefeller Foundation; and Villa Carlotta, the mother of them all, a seventeenth-century, seventeen-acre pleasure palace built by a milanese marquis. More than high-calorie eye candy for visitors and locals alike, it’s the presence of those sprawling estates that has protected the most coveted lakefront property from an endless line of development.
(Not all Como history is so peaceable. On April 27, 1945, Benito Mussolini and his mistress, Claretta Petacci, were captured on the northwestern shore of the lake, part of a convoy of fifty Fascists heading for the Swiss border. After holding them overnight, their Communist captors executed the couple against the wall of a villa the next afternoon.)
One thing Como is not famous for is its food. When locals and foreigners wax poetic about the wonders of regional Italian cuisine—the truffles and Barolo of Piedmont, the bread and burrata of Puglia—the lake district doesn’t register high on the excitement list. That’s not to say you will eat poorly here. This is Italy, after all, where bad meals are as rare as honest politicians. You’ll find plenty of excellent restaurants and beautiful markets and even a handful of farms and artisanal producers making the type of small-scale, high-quality ingredients that drive Italy’s regional gastronomy.
The core staples of far-northern Italian food have a strong role around the lake. Polenta shows up in forms both soft and creamy, firm and crispy, serving as a base for meat, vegetables, and fish. Most of Italy’s rice production takes place fifty miles to the south, in the sunken paddies surrounding Vercelli, and fittingly, it’s not hard to find excellent risotto made with arborio or carnaroli rice in almost any restaurant you stop into. But don’t come here expecting rib-sticking red-sauce fare, delicate seasonal vegetable dishes, or a catalog of regional pasta creations.
Lake Como sits just below the Swiss border, and at times it looks, sounds, and tastes more central European than Italian. The local dialect has the hard, guttural edge of German; the architecture is a mix of soaring Baroque and Swiss mountain chalet. Butter trumps olive oil, cakes and baked goods are often more German than Italian in spirit, cheese tastes as though it’s made for melting over a fondue flame. The most Italian part of the cuisine of Lake Como is the insistence on local, high-quality ingredients as the foundation for everything that comes out of the kitchen. And nothing is more local and of higher quality than the schools of fish swimming just beneath the lake’s surface. (You’ll see them everywhere—the waters of Lake Como are so crystal clear you that could read a book through them.)
For most of Lake Como’s history, fishing has been a fundamental form of survival for the local population. Commercial fishing has never been big on the lake; the market for lake fish beyond those who live here is tiny. But throughout much of the twentieth century, adult males took up rod and net, catching enough to feed their families, perhaps enough to barter with. After World War II, when food supplies dwindled dramatically, fishing became a means of survival for nearly everyone on the lake.
Today, in San Giovanni’s tiny port, you’ll still find twenty-five fishing boats—about one for every adult male resident. But most of those boats don’t go out daily, or even weekly anymore. During the 1970s and ’80s, as a handful of Lake Como’s largest industries shuttered, many of the poorest residents fled to Milan and other urban areas in search of opportunity. Fishing slowly evolved from a form of survival to a pastime for all but a handful of the lake’s 200,000 residents.
There are just eighty licensed commercial fishermen on all of Lake Como, a number carefully calibrated to keep the stocks of fish sustainable year after year. Not all eighty fishermen work the waters consistently, but they treat the licenses like family heirlooms, passing them down from one generation to the next.
Alessandro keeps two fishing boats in San Giovanni’s port, one an eighteen-foot cruiser with a center console for longer trips on the lake, the other the one he uses most often, a stripped-down fifteen-footer with nothing but an outboard motor and a steering wheel and accelerator in the nose of the boat that allow him to maneuver from either end of the vessel. The most vital equipment is the nets themselves, which come wound onto metal poles and spools that he mounts to the nose of the boat for easy release and collection.
Alessandro commonly fishes around a dozen of the lake’s twenty-eight species of fish—from the small, fatty alborella, a freshwater sardine of sorts; to luccio, pike, spotted and sleek; to the bulky tinca, tench, a peculiar species with a whiskered face and a plump, pale green body. All serious fishing done on the lake is with vertical hanging nets cast, cast and collected by hand. Each type of fish requires its own net—the size of the holes in the net and the depth at which it floats are fine-tuned to target one fish and one fish only. Bycatch happens here as it does anywhere, but the fishermen of Lake Como rightly take pride in their careful and calculated net deployment.
Alessandro and the morning’s catch.
Matt Goulding
On our first afternoon on the water, the clouds hang menacingly overhead, thick and swirled with dark rivulets, like cappuccino foam. Today we’re after two different species, a standard strategy for Alessandro on the lake. Perch is a bottom-feeding species, fattening on the ecosystem of plankton and larvae that line the lake bed. At €60 for a kilo of cleaned fillets, it’s the most expensive species pulled from Como, competing with top-tier saltwater fish in terms of price. Part of the price is driven by its star role in Como’s most ubiquitous restaurant dish, riso e filetto di pesce persico: fillets of whitefish, floured and lightly fried, served over boiled rice goosed with butter and sage.
We start close to the shore with persico nets. Each net comes wound onto a metal pole, which Alessandro hangs from a wooden frame at the nose of the boat. He then inches the boat forward so that the net unspools on its own and falls into place in the water. On an average day, Alessandro will unspool seven or eight nets, nearly a kilometer of nylon stitched across Como’s surface.
Next, he turns to a more challenging task. Agone (freshwater shad) is a small, fatty fish that feeds in deeper waters, requiring nets that float three meters below the surface and move freely with the current. Before setting the nets, Alessandro calculates the current, then gets a reading on the wind—velocity and direction—and begins to do the math to figure out just how far upshore he needs to travel to ensure that the nets will be close to San Giovanni when he comes back tomorrow morning to collect them. The numbers matter; a strong current and wind working in tandem can carry the agone nets more than seven kilometers overnight.
Fishing used to be a two-man job: one man would row the boat or work the sail, while the other handled the nets. Starting in the 1970s, when outboard motors became common among Lake Como’s small fishing fleet, it transformed largely into a one-man operation. In Alessandro’s case, it’s not an entirely one-man operation—more like a one-man and one-man’s-best-friend operation. His ten-year-old golden retriever, Ice, goes out with him most days, keeping him company on the lake as he sets and collects nets. He’s even trained the dog to handle a few key parts of the daily operations—fetching a buoy, carrying the keys from the boat to the restaurant in his mouth.
When the last shad net is cast, I turn to Alessandro. “Now what?”
“We come back at dawn and hope for the best.”
* * *
When Rino and Graziella Sala first took over at Mella in 1958, the menu was two dishes long: riso e filetto di pesce persico and arborella fritta, fried carp. They’d run specials from time to time—pollo alla cacciatora, polenta with wild mushrooms—but the cooking and the economy of the restaurant relied entirely on what the lake provided. They had a steady trickle of loyal customers, but it was never an easy business: the couple worked seven days a week, twelve months a year, and still took on debt for years.
Back in those days, nearly every man in San Giovanni was a fisherman—if not commercially, then one who used the lake catch to feed his family. They used nets made of silk and cotton and hung them out to dry on the stone walls—a giant, continuous spiderweb of purple, white, and red that ran through the town.
Alessandro comes from a long line of fishermen—as best as he and his mother can remember, at least four generations of Sala men have fished these waters before him. Photos on the wall document the Sala family’s time working the Lake Como waters: his grandfather pulling into port, his father on the docks of San Giovanni, a wall of plump shad behind him, drying under the midday sun.
Alessandro first learned to fish as a young boy on trips with his grandfather. He loved lake life—getting lost in the sprawling villa properties around San Giovanni, climbing through the forests that carpet the mountains, cooling off on the rocky shores after a day of mischief making. When he graduated from high school, he did twelve months of military service, then came back to San Giovanni to help his parents run the restaurant. Graziella had five sisters, each with three or four kids of her own, and everyone in the family worked at Mella at one point or another. But the job wasn’t big enough to sustain a family, so Alessandro traveled around Como with his catch, selling perch, whitefish, and bleak to other restaurants. He didn’t plan to be a professional fisherman, but when his dad unexpectedly passed away in 1991, he quickly recalculated his life plans.
Rosy Castelli was born and raised up the road in Civenna, a mountain village about five kilometers behind and above San Giovanni. She knew Alessandro as the good-looking guy who rode his Vespa through town from time to time, always fast, always without a helmet—a lakeside James Dean looking for a cause. On one of those trips, he told Rosy that he and his parents needed help at the restaurant. Rosy was timid, not the type to ride off into the sunset on the back of a stranger’s Vespa, but the prospect of a steady job lured her down to San Giovanni and into the lives of the Sala family. When asked all these years later if the job offer was a ploy to bring them together, Alessandro only smiles.
Rosy runs the dining room at Mella with a quiet grace that allows her, like all great hosts, to adapt to her guests: if they have come to San Giovanni for a quiet lakeside lunch, she serves them their food and gives them their space; if they have come to learn what makes Mella a special outpost of regional Italian cookery, she fills their minds and bellies with the information they crave. “Sometimes you use four words to speak to a guest. Other times, two will do.”
From net to table: a fillet of char, seared on the flattop at Mella.
Matt Goulding
Alessandro isn’t the chef; that distinction belongs to Bruno Mainetti, a hard-smoking, shoulder-shrugging napoletano with a wry sense of humor and a love of slow-simmered sauces. It’s no secret that Bruno prefers stirring red sauce to boning and browning perch, but he handles both with the skill and respect of a serious cook. Alessandro is never far from the kitchen activity, and during a busy service, he’s likely to trade his fishing jacket for a chef’s coat and take a position at the flattop. “He has a hard time staying out of the kitchen,” says Rosy. “He wants to make sure his fish is being handled with care.”
Education is a fundamental part of the work at Mella. That’s why there are clipboards available with an encyclopedic rundown of the principal species of lake fish. That’s why Rosy takes the extra time to explain the origin of dishes to curious clients. That’s why Alessandro takes school classes, curious guests, and persistent journalists out on the lake for a closer vantage on the life of a Como pescatore. The first lesson, on the water and in the restaurant, is understanding the difference between lake fish and ocean fish.
People think of lake fish as inferior. It’s what Alessandro’s neighbor Cristian Ponzini, the owner of Silvio, calls “the war of lake fish versus ocean fish,” a lifelong attempt to prove to diners that freshwater fish has a place on the table. “You can ask people in Milan if they think there are professional fishermen in the lakes, and they’ll tell you no,” says Alessandro. “The only people who eat lake fish are lake people or the tourists who visit us here.”
To be sure, lake fish is more subtle than saltwater fish—the flavor less pronounced, the range more limited. What matters most is the quality of the water they live in. Catch a fish in a small, murky pond dense with dirt and sediment and you’ll be eating fish with an undertow of earth in its flesh. “Think of it like the concept of terreno in wine,” says Alessandro. “A fillet of lavarello from Lake Como tastes different from a fillet from Lake Garda.” Lake Como is known for the purity of its water, and the fish that Alessandro catches reflects it: mild, meaty, a near-blank canvas for a variety of flavors and techniques.
If Alessandro and Rosy are working from a disadvantage in terms of product recognition, they have put generations of accumulated experience into practice to fill the menu with dozens of little tastes of Como. They make fragrant, full-flavored stocks from the bones and bodies of perch and chub. They cure whitefish eggs in salt, creating a sort of freshwater bottarga, ready to be grated over pasta and rice. Shad is brined in vinegar and herbs, whitefish becomes a slow-cooked ragù or a filling for ravioli, and pigo and pike form the basis of Mella’s polpettine di pesce. Pickled, dried, smoked, cured, pâtéd: a battery of techniques to ensure that nothing goes to waste. If you can make it with meat, there’s a good chance Alessandro and Rosy have made it with lake fish.
And then there’s missoltino, the lake’s most important by-product, a staple that stretches back to medieval times and has been named a presidio by Slow Food, a designation reserved for the country’s most important ingredients and food traditions. The people still making missoltino can be counted on a single hand. Alessandro guts and scales hundreds of shad at a time, salts the bodies, and hangs them like laundry to dry under the sun for forty-eight hours or more. The dried fish are then layered with bay leaves, packed into metal canisters, and weighed down. Slowly the natural oils from the shad escape and bubble to the surface, forming a protective layer that preserves the missoltino indefinitely.
It can be used as a condiment of sorts, a weapons-grade dose of lake umami to be detonated in salads and pastas. In its most classic preparation, served with toc, a thick, rich scoop of polenta slow cooked in a copper pot over a wood fire, it tastes of nothing you’ve eaten in Italy—or anywhere else.
“Tastes are changing,” says Alessandro. “If we tried to cook the menu that my parents cooked twenty years ago, we wouldn’t be able to do it. Back then, it was all whole fish: grilled, fried, in the oven.” Mella’s few concessions to contemporary tastes—the blini with the purple swoosh of caramelized onions, the herb-strewn lake “paella”—may seem like a small distance to travel in a sixty-year journey, but to Alessandro and Rosy, they mark an entrance into a world their parents would only vaguely recognize. “People want options now, dozens of them, and they want clean fish: no bones, easy to eat. We try to respect that but keep the traditions in place.
“Our type of food will never be competitive with the big restaurants of Italy,” says Alessandro. Even the big restaurants surrounding Lake Como. Down the road, at Silvio, diners pack in by the dozens for a taste of lake cuisine with cheffy flourishes. In Bellagio, a mediocre pizzeria sees more customers in a day than Mella sees in a week. Its location in one of Como’s tiniest villages, an unlikely place to search for greatness, means that people come to Mella not by default but by decision. It’s one of the only restaurants on the lake listed in Slow Food’s guide to Italy’s best osterie, a bible for the country’s serious eaters. When I mention that to Alessandro and Rosy, they seem genuinely perplexed.
“Really? That can’t be,” says Rosy. I pull the book out of my bag, turn to the dog-eared page, and pass it across the table. “Huh. There we are.” Alessandro continues to stare at the page, as if seeing is not believing. Finally he closes the book and leaves it on the table. “To be honest, I’m allergic to guides. They make you do things you don’t want to do. I want to be left alone to do this as we decide to do it.”
* * *
My short, unhappy life as a fisherman is one of humiliation and defeat, of failures so pronounced they feel cartoonish in hindsight: hooked boot, broken rod, shattered ego. At nineteen, after a decade of disappointment, I found myself on the verge of my first catch, a sparkling bass from a pond in Southern California, three pounds if it was an ounce, but just as the fish was within my grasp, the line snapped and my catch vanished, leaving me to wallow in my ineptitude. It would be another nine years before I finally reeled in a fish, which I bathed in brown butter and capers and devoured with a vengeance.
I worry that my shortcomings as a fisherman will seep into Alessandro’s daily work on Lake Como. But on our first early morning out collecting the perch and whitefish nets we dropped yesterday afternoon, it’s immediately clear that his skill far exceeds any troubled past I drag onto the boat. The nets are plugged everywhere with small silver fish with bright orange fins, one every few feet of net to be plucked from the hole and placed into a large Styrofoam container. Within thirty seconds, he knows he’ll pull in fifteen kilos of perch before the morning is out.
Alessandro scoops up a large green fish among the catch, its jaw locked around a perch trapped in the net, a rare instance of bycatch in a process carefully calibrated to keep the lake sustainably stocked. “We set the net sizes so that the fish we catch are at least three years old—old enough to have reproduced at least once. Small fish pass right through, larger ones hit the net and keep going.” A crew of fifty wardens, a mix of government employees and volunteers, works the waters, holding commercial and casual fishermen to the lake’s strict quotas.
“The system is set up to be sustainable for eighty of us. If you add any more, either the lake goes hungry or we do.”
In other parts of Italy, the struggle to save fishing traditions is very real. On the island of Burano, in the Venetian lagoon, pescatori and clam diggers struggle with the impact of global warming and mass tourism. In Liguria, the stunning stretch of coast that houses some of Italy’s most charming hamlets, including the five villages of the famed Cinque Terre, tourism has proven more lucrative than fishing, and many have traded their nets for jobs on terra firma. Ittiturismo, an idea the Sala family helped pioneer in Italy, addresses both threats, providing education about and awareness of the environmental threats to sustainable fishing while offering tourists a chance to partake in an ancient tradition.
Matt Goulding
By 8 A.M., yesterday’s nets are in and the catch is accounted for. By 9 A.M., Alessandro has unloaded the boat and taken the fish to the prep kitchen below Mella. By 11 A.M., twenty kilos of perch and whitefish have been gutted, scaled, and filleted and are ready for a searing flattop or a pan of risotto.
Over the next week, Alessandro and I fall into a rhythm: out in the late afternoon to drop the nets, back at dawn to collect the fish. I’ve always believed fishing to be a mixture of manual labor and Zen-like patience, but with each passing day, I come to appreciate a more nuanced picture, one filled with little tricks and moments of intuition and raw intelligence. Fishing at this level is part science, part art. If anything, Alessandro leans toward the latter. His boat has no electronic equipment to speak of—no radar, no depth finder, no next-generation nets or reels. He knows the depth of the lake at any given spot from years of practice. He makes constant calculations and recalculations based on the emerging evidence—a shift in the wind, a change in water temperature—and generally makes a strong argument that the key tool in a fisherman’s kit is an active mind and a sharp intellect.
Every morning I come home wet and frozen. Every morning my wife greets me at the door with a warm towel and a cool grin. “Ciao, mio pescatore!” It becomes a running joke in San Giovanni. Marco, the cheery barista at Nenè Food Bellagio, the village’s lone café, serves every spritz with an inquiry about the day’s catch. The old men who gather at the port in the afternoons eye me with a mix of wonder and suspicion. Chef Bruno waits by the docks, smoking cigarettes, ready to question my competency. “What, no fish today?” For her part, Mamma Graziella appears ready to make us members of the family. “Stay as long as you like.”
I indulge in the fisherman fantasy, though secretly I fear that Alessandro would prefer his regular fishing companion, Ice, back on the boat. The regal retriever carries keys and fetches buoys and probably speaks better Italian than I do.
But Alessandro’s patience with me never wavers. Most days, we fish in the rain, normally a light, persistent drizzle that clings to our bodies and seeps into our bones. Alessandro knows this lake better than most people know themselves, and behind every inch of shoreline, every distant villa, every quiet cove is a memory. He tells fishing tales, but of a different stripe than the ones I’m used to—about the first time he took his son out to teach him how to fish and how the young boy counted the fish like sheep until he fell asleep. Or the wealthy couple from Milan who went out dressed to the nines and came back with fish guts fermenting on their Armani threads. Or the time a police boat pulled him and a fellow fisherman over close to Clooney’s compound in Laglio, concerned that they were paparazzi. “I’m trying to work, and he’s talking to me about photos of George Clooney!” (The police concern wasn’t unfounded; paparazzi have been known to dress up like fishermen in the hope of snapping a shot of Lake Como’s gods.)
One afternoon, the drizzle turns into a deluge. We race to collect the nets, but the rain comes down in thick sheets that swallow the lake whole. Alessandro gives up on the nets, calmly steers the boat along the coast until he finds the mouth of a cave, and maneuvers us under its rocky roof. At first we just float there, saying nothing, listening to the thunderous collision of water. Finally Alessandro speaks up.
“A few years back, I got a phone call from a couple from Milano. They had just been on vacation where their teenage son fell in love with fishing, and they wanted to know if I’d be open to taking him out on the lake to show him a few things. ‘He’s disabled,’ the mother told me, ‘but he’s very active and all he talks about now is fishing.’ They came up a few weekends later, and I took all three out in the afternoon on the boat. As soon as we’re out of the port, the boy gets anxious: ‘When can we throw the nets? When can we throw the nets?’ I taught him a few of the basic techniques, pulled up a net or two to show him the catch, but left the rest in the water as I would on any other day. Later, they came in for dinner. At the end of the meal, the dad pulled me aside: ‘I’m wondering if you could find a place for us to stay tonight. We’d really like to go back out again when you pull up those nets.’ Rosy put them up in one of our rooms, and at 4 A.M., the father and son loaded into the boat and off we went. Again the boy was anxious to get involved. You know what it’s like—these nets are heavy and hard to handle, and the boy had a serious disability, but that didn’t stop him. He insisted on pulling up all the nets. We had a huge morning—about fifty pounds of persico and tinca. You can’t imagine the smile on his face as we pulled into port. That was years ago, but the boy still calls the restaurant to see how the fishing is going.”
The sound of the storm crashing into Lake Como fills the cave with a white noise that nearly drowns out the little cracks in his voice. “You don’t do this job to make money.”
* * *
After four days of rain, the sky finally breaks on our last morning in San Giovanni. I meet Alessandro in the port at 6 A.M., our routine now so ingrained that we slip wordlessly into our positions on the boat. The sun won’t rise for another two hours, and the vast darkness swallows us the moment we leave the port. An orange sickle moon hovers just above the bell tower of Saint John the Baptist, smirking, as if it knows something we don’t.
Last night in the driving rain we dropped seven nets—four for perch, three for shad. The weekend is coming and, with it, more mouths to feed. Soon Mella will shutter for the winter and life around the lake will go quiet. Alessandro and Rosy like to travel when the restaurant is closed—to Spain or Portugal or Mexico, places where Rosy can relax and Alessandro can fish.
The first net comes up slowly, weighed down by a web of writhing bodies. We pluck the perch from their place in Alessandro’s nylon wall and deposit them in a hard-plastic bucket. The morning looks promising.
It’s too early to talk, so we work in silence, the only noise the rattle of the engine and the patter of Alessandro’s lessons replaying in my mind.
Keep the nets clean. Wrap them carefully. A tangled net or a broken net can ruin you.
The work is in the nets: cast them in the evening, reclaim them in the morning. Fishing is an act of faith—like running a restaurant in a tiny village, raising a family on a boat, or riding a Vespa up the mountain in search of the one girl who will make you whole. With every cast of the net, Alessandro’s life on Lake Como grows a few inches deeper.
Another net, another wall of fish. Alessandro flips a perch into the bucket, and the undead contort on contact. A large spotted char comes up with the last piece of persico net, its mouth wrapped around a small perch. An unexpected passenger, the kind that could feed a family of milanesi later tonight. Alessandro pries it from the perch and throws it back in the water, just as he does every time there’s a doubt.
Treat the lake as though your children will need it to survive.
We move toward the center of the lake, searching for the lavarello nets. The few clouds in the sky have turned to cotton candy, meaning the sun isn’t far behind. Across the water in San Giovanni, the bells begin to sing their morning song, the last I will hear at Alessandro’s side. Our plane departs from Milano in four hours; my time in Italy is coming to an end.
Keep your mind active. Pay attention to everything. Every detail can impact the catch.
The first two lavarello nets come up empty, save for a few feisty crayfish. Maybe we worked this area too hard earlier in the week. Maybe the current shifted in the night. Maybe the whitefish decided to swim deeper.
Alessandro keeps after the net, pulling it up piece by piece, his face fixed on the nylon.
It doesn’t matter what we catch right now. The nets are already set. What matters is what we learn about tomorrow.