Some partnerships start with a plan. Alberto and Luca’s started with a 12-year-old boy standing at the edge of the Serchio River, unable to cross because his rubber boots were too short.
A young man wading up from downstream, a spinning rod in hand and hip boots on his legs, asked if he wanted a lift. He hoisted the boy onto his shoulders and carried him to the other bank. That young man was Alberto. The boy was Luca. Decades later, the two would become the founders of Tenkara Italia, possibly the first website in Italy dedicated to tenkara fishing, and the team behind the SIRAI rod series, the first tenkara rods designed and handcrafted entirely in Italy.
From the River as Children to Tenkara as Adults
Both anglers grew up on the water. Alberto remembers his father walking him to the river on Sunday mornings before settling under a willow tree with a newspaper. He learned to fish by watching his older brother, an avid angler, and simply imitating him. Luca’s introduction came the same way, fishing as a boy alongside his father. When his dad started experimenting with fly fishing, he handed young Luca a telescopic fiberglass rod rigged with a green braided line and a single fly.
Tenkara found each of them at a different moment, but their experiences were again connected.
For Alberto, it arrived about ten years ago during a kind of angling slump. He had fished countless rivers and caught plenty of fish, but the spark was gone. Then he stumbled onto tenkara and was struck immediately by its simplicity and effectiveness. “It was love at first sight, right at the opportune moment,” he says.
For Luca, the door opened through Alberto. Three years ago, Alberto introduced him to tenkara, and Luca’s passion for fishing came rushing back, along with a memory of that old fiberglass rod from his childhood.
These days, both anglers lean almost entirely on tenkara when they’re on mountain streams, though Alberto will pick up a fly rod or spinning gear for larger water, and he’s looking forward to another pike outing this fall. Luca, for his part, has settled fully into tenkara’s minimalism, which he says lets him enjoy both the fishing itself and the wild places it takes him.
Home Water in the Garfagnana Valley
Ask either of them where home is, and the answer is the same valley, described two different ways.
Alberto calls the Serchio River, in northern Tuscany, his spiritual father. “It basically raised me,” he says. The river is home to the Mediterranean trout (Salmo cettii), a native species endemic to central Italy, and Alberto works alongside fellow volunteers on its protection and conservation. Fishing wild trout in the Serchio and its tributaries taught him what he considers the single most important skill in tenkara, stealth. Everything else, he says, is secondary.
Luca describes the same region in more grounded terms, simply the waters closest to home. He and Alberto live in Garfagnana, a long, narrow valley in Tuscany carved by the Serchio and a web of tributaries that begin as pristine mountain springs before growing into the creeks and streams that hold the region’s trout and other aquatic life.
Trout are the primary quarry for both anglers, what Luca calls simply “the queen.” In the valley’s smaller streams, staying invisible isn’t optional, and fishing that way, he says, makes an angler one with nature while staying remarkably effective. Alberto adds grayling to his wish list, a species he chases a couple of times a year at the foot of the Alps, along with the large chub that populate the valley’s lowland waters, fish he describes as wild, unpredictable, and occasionally maddening. “One day you catch twenty fish,” he says, “and the next, the river seems completely sterile.”
Building Tenkara Italia
Tenkara Italia began the way a lot of good ideas do, as a complaint that turned into a project. Alberto and Luca were frustrated by how hard it was to find tenkara gear in Italy, and how expensive it was when they did. The obvious question followed, why wasn’t anyone making rods in Italy at all? So they decided to find out for themselves, tracking down Veret, a local artisan tackle manufacturer, and talking them into the adventure.
When they launched, Tenkara Italia became something close to singular in the country. Aside from a handful of social media accounts touching on the subject, theirs was, in Alberto’s words, “really the only website” dedicated to tenkara in Italy. The number of tenkara anglers in the country has stayed small and stable, which both founders see as opportunity rather than ceiling, particularly among younger anglers. Their mission has always carried two threads at once: promoting tenkara as, in Alberto’s phrase, “the easiest way to fly fish,” and spreading the ethics of catch-and-release alongside it.
That mission is about to take a more hands-on shape. Throughout 2027, Luca says Tenkara Italia will run a series of boot camps, some free and some paid, aimed specifically at children and young beginners, built around catch-and-release and respect for waterways and the life in them.
Looking further ahead, Alberto’s goal is simple. He’d love to see every angler convert to catch-and-release through tenkara. Luca frames the same ambition on a bigger map, hoping to help introduce tenkara to more anglers across Italy and Europe, and for Tenkara Italia to become the reference point for anyone starting out or going deeper into the discipline.
Their two published books, including the full guide “Tenkara Italian Style” and a free manual for beginners, grew out of that same impulse to share. The pair see the books as tools for showing off tenkara’s simplicity and beauty, and for introducing their particular vision: marrying Eastern technique with the Western tradition of fly fishing. Luca describes “Italian style” as an approach built on imagination, adaptability, and creativity, applied not just to the fishing itself but to the equipment. The SIRAI series rods, he notes, are entirely designed and handcrafted in Italy, which makes “Italian style” as much a statement about the gear as about the cast.
Designing Rods for Italian Water
The three rods in the SIRAI line, the Riale, Torrente, and Fiume, were born from a very specific problem. Italy still has rivers holding genuinely large fish, and Alberto and Luca wanted tackle built for exactly those environments, capable of landing an oversized fish quickly enough to ensure it survives release.
What unites the three models, according to Luca, is an unusually sensitive tip paired with a surprisingly powerful backbone, a combination that lets the rods handle everything from bead-head nymphs to terrestrials without breaking easily, while still giving the angler real control over bigger fish.
Building them wasn’t simple, even for a company with more than fifty years of rod-making experience. Fabio, from Veret, put it bluntly: “Tenkara rods are a whole different story.” The hardest part, Alberto says, was working with such thin diameters and wall thicknesses. The payoff has come in the response from the people actually fishing them. “Our greatest pride comes from customer reviews,” Luca says. “They reassure us that we’re heading in the right direction.”
On the line and fly side, the two keep things close to the bone. Alberto fishes a #3.5 level line almost exclusively, pairing it with a sturdy 0.16mm or 0.14mm tippet, roughly 4X to 5X. He ties on jun kebari often, but ultimately lets the river decide. A nymph when the water is cold and fish are holding deep, a dry fly when they’re actively rising. He fishes with nothing more than a simple hip pack, wading wet without waders as soon as the weather allows. “It doesn’t get any simpler than that,” he says.
Luca is on the same wavelength, though the two will sometimes carry a quiver of two or three rods in different lengths to adapt to changing river conditions, flies tied themselves, often from materials gathered straight from the woods and water around them.
What Tenkara Teaches
For Alberto, tenkara’s real gift is freedom from technical worry. It lets an angler fish without fussing over complex mechanics, which he considers the essence of fly fishing itself, a simplicity that adds value even for anglers who practice other methods. Luca agrees, describing tenkara as a return to essentials, a reminder that more gear and more complexity aren’t what make someone a better angler.
Their advice for newcomers follows the same philosophy. Alberto’s counsel is about approach above all else. Be invisible, since rod, line, and fly all come second to that. He still sees too many anglers standing tall on top of rocks. His best trout, he says, have come on his knees. Luca’s advice is about patience, taking the time to observe the river and understand where fish are likely holding before worrying about gear at all. People fixate on finding the right rod or fly, he says, and forget that reading the water and adapting to it matters far more.
Life Beyond the River
Both men call Garfagnana, that same beautiful valley in northern Tuscany, home. Alberto directs an agricultural association, has been married for 25 years, and has a 25-year-old son who fishes alongside him. Outside of tenkara, his hobbies run to the mountains in every season, hiking in summer and ski touring in winter, along with filmmaking, including interviews and nature documentaries.
Luca works as a risk manager for an Italian multinational group, has been married for 19 years, and has two daughters. His hobbies outside fishing are the mountains and DIY projects.
Readers who want to follow along or get in touch can find Tenkara Italia at www.tenkaraitalia.it, by email at info@tenkaraitalia.it, or on YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram under the name Tenkara Italia.
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