Magazine Confluenze | fly fishing experience Number 8 Year 2 | Page 45

At this point, I asked myself if also in the
several paintings in Valsesia valley was
possible to find any evidence regarding fly
fishing. Hence, I started investigating and
I eventually found in Rimella, a Walseroriginated village at 1,176 mts/asl, on the
walls of the ossuary dated 1730, a painting by Carlo Bartolomeo Borsetti (1698 –
1759) showing a boy with a rod lifting a
fish. There is also an extraordinary sentence in Latin which, according to the experts, is absolutely the very first one
referred to fly fishing. I have to thank for
that my friend Marco Baltieri, without
whom I would not have been able to
translate it and understand the meaning.
It is a citation taken from Martial (Epigrams) (V,18) (imitantur hamos dona),
mentionned by Andrew Herd (The Fly)
and Renzo Dionigi (Rings on the water):
both authors consider this the very first
citation regarding fly fishing. The com-

plete wording is: ‘imitantur hamos dona:
namque quis nescit avidum vorata decipi
scarum musca?’ that, according to
Dionigi’s translation, means: ‘presents are
like hooks: who doesn’t know that the
avid lip is victim of the fly it has devoured?’
Martial lived between the end of the first
and the beginning of the second century
after Christ and this wording was often
used in the ‘emblems’, paintings that
matched an image with a philosophical
motto. So, for the first time in Valsesia
valley a painting showing a fishing scene
with a precise reference to fly fishing has
been found, although of literary type only.
This is a further demonstration that, already in the past centuries (we are talking
1730), fly fishing was part of Valsesia’s
culture, so that it was worth to be mentionned in a sacred place and deserved a
classical citation, too.