My chest-high fishing waders and rubber boots clashed sharply with the smartly dressed people on the elegant streets of Treviso, Italy. I felt like a character from “A River Runs Through It” dropped onto the set of “La Dolce Vita.”
I swung a leg over the stone parapet and wrought iron railing of Ponte Sant’Agata and, clasping my fly rod, gently lowered myself to the cutwater at the base of a bridge pier, where Damiano Molon, my guide, stood hip-deep in the cold, clear current of the Cagnan Grande Canal.
Above us, the streets thrummed with cars, cafes and conversations. Here, in the water and mostly hidden from the rest of the city, our urban meditation had begun.
A surprise encounter with a man similarly decked out in fishing gear during a visit to Treviso in 2024 brought me back to fish last summer. That man, standing outside a bar and sipping a spritz, intrigued me. I had fished in North Carolina creeks barely deep enough to dampen my ankles and from drift boats in Oregon rivers. But even though I had been fly-fishing since I was a kid, I had never done it in the middle of a city.
Treviso, an elegant river- and canal-threaded city of about 94,000, just north of Venice, has a long history of fishing. Its waterways, fed by a series of springs just a few miles to the north, remain around 50 degrees Fahrenheit year-round and teem with trout, carp and chub, attracting waterfowl and plenty of people with rods — though, as Damiano told me, not many Americans.
Damiano spotted a fat brown trout in the current several yards away, and I aimed my cast at it. The fly line landed with a thwap loud enough to spook the fish. With no other trout in sight here, we waded upstream a bit to try again.
It’s All in the Water
One can fish in Treviso without a guide, but Damiano made my experience much more enjoyable. During our four days together, I learned much about the delights and peculiarities of street fishing. He knew the waters and the habits of the fish, and he helped with the local fishing rules, which were maddeningly difficult to figure out and vary by day, location and types of lures permitted.
Damiano, 26, has fishing in his blood. His father and grandfather nurtured his passion for urban fishing, he said, a trait he called unusual among his hometown peers. Guiding visitors, he explained, gives him a chance to do what he loves, and share it with others.
Like flâneurs with fly rods, we wandered the city, sometimes fishing from embankments and bridges, often climbing down to the canals and rivers, where the fish were plentiful and often unexpectedly big.
While we walked and waded, we talked about Treviso and how fishing and urban life can coexist. It turns out it has a lot to do with water quality. Much like aquatic versions of canaries in the coal mine, trout depend on fairly clean and cool water, and Treviso’s springs provide ideal conditions for them. Artists have celebrated the area’s waters for centuries (Dante Alighieri even referred to them in “The Divine Comedy”).
Even as cities like Paris, London and Los Angeles work to clean up and restore access to waterways that have been buried, polluted and diverted and to encourage urban anglers, Treviso’s fishing holes have remained mostly pristine and accessible, and urban fishing has flourished there.
Chasing the Elusive Brown
Several hundred yards upstream from where we first entered the water, I caught (and released) my first trout, a plump rainbow, near the Isola della Pescheria, a small, leafy island that hosts the city’s fish market.
I quickly caught a half-dozen more rainbows, which live in relative harmony with their brown trout cousins, which are native to the area. Paradoxically, though the stalls in the market sold farmed rainbow trout among the glistening seafood, I never found a restaurant in Treviso that served rainbows.
Then I spied a brown trout so close I’d need only to make a simple roll cast to put my nymph in its path. Instead, I overshot, smacking the bridge with my weighted fly, scaring the fish and creating a bird’s nest of knots in my line. “Incredible,” Damiano teased me.
Eager to find fewer obstacles, he led me on a half-mile walk to a corner of the city’s old walls. Stalking carefully along the banks of the Botteniga River beside a massive earthen-and-brick bastion, we could smell the invigorating perfume of wild mint. I cast into a deep pool and hooked a huge rainbow. But in my excitement, I played the fish too hard and it snapped the fly from my delicate line. “It’s not a tuna,” Damiano said. “Gentle.”
After a quick lunch of cicchetti — tapas-like snacks common in the region — and cold bottles of Peroni beer at a nearby restaurant, we worked our way back up the Cagnan Grande Canal. Below the Ponte di San Francesco, within casting distance of my rental apartment, we spotted a fine brown trout tucked in the slightly calmer water gushing below one of the city’s several still-turning water wheels. But the fish ignored my many casts. “Fa lo snob,” Damiano said — “He’s being a snob.”
The Art of Urban Casting
Later that afternoon, at Porta San Tomaso, a monumental Renaissance-era city gate of luminous white Istrian stone on the town’s northern wall, Damiano gave me another lesson on the idiosyncrasies of urban fly casting.
From the bottom of the steep bank of the Botteniga, he whipped the rod skyward, fly line sailing high above people walking, cycling and motoring by. The trick, as always, was casting without snagging anything or anyone by accident.
“I call this one the sun cast,” he said, deftly dropping a dark-colored nymph into a pool in what once functioned as part of the city’s moat system. After a sharp tug on the line, and a battle of several minutes, he landed and released a huge brown trout. Despite the drab-sounding name, the fish was a riot of colors.
The sight made me long to land a brown trout of my own.
When overnight rain made the city’s crystalline waters too cloudy to fish the next day, we drove a couple of miles northeast, to the Storga River, a suburban tributary.
As I stood midstream in a sun-dappled tunnel of low-hanging tree branches, I visualized a colossal fresco I had seen at the Church of San Nicolò. In it, a haloed St. Christopher, the patron saint of travelers, stood in a river teeming with eel, crayfish, pike and trout. My cast was hardly divinely inspired; it looked more like the motion of a man awkwardly trying to shoo a wasp. But the spell was broken anyway. I hooked, landed and released my first brown trout, and went on to catch several more that day.
On my last morning in Treviso, as I waited outside my apartment for a cab to the Venice airport, I saw a trio of anglers on the bank across the canal. No one said a word as they cast.
I wanted to interrupt their reverie and tell them about my own urban fishing revelations, about catching my first brown, but fought the urge, remembering Damiano’s words from a previous day.
“We’ve been fishing here for centuries,” he said. “People here don’t think we’re that strange.”
If you go:
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Fishing season this year runs from March 8 to Sept. 27.
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The licensing rules are complex. A fishing license costs about €13, or $15.30, for non-Italians. You will also need a separate local permit, which costs €25 per day, or €165 annually. A guide can help make arrangements.
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You can find a guide through the Associazione Italiana Guide Professionali di Pesca. Guided fly fishing typically costs €150 to €200 a day and does not include licensing or equipment rental, for which most guides charge about €50 per day.
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