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This is a scrap-book about one year of ethnographical researches beginned in a public library and accomplished outdoor near Po river and its affluents, searching fishes, old fishermen, ancient folk customs and new living traditions.

The first month (April) is dedicated to the reading of two latin treatises on human health and ichthology, the one written in XV century by Bartolomeo Sacchi (a great humanist), and the other in XVI century by Paolo Giovio (cardinal of the Catholic Curch in Rome). The third reading discussed in April is a fairy-tale on King-Fish (Aarne-Thompson’s type number 303).

In May we go out of the library and we walk around the city, looking for tattooing-shops where we finally find the Koi (an holy-buddhistic carp-image). Strange…Carp is also the “totem-fish” of Mantuans. There is a link?

A carp-fishing-trophy, caught in the Upper-lake of Mantua, stirs up the memory of Erineo Bevini, an old fisherman and quick story teller.

In June we visit the fresh-water-aquarium in Motta Baluffi and we speak with its owner, Vitaliano Davolio, about silurus. After the aquarium, we go in a fishermen’s cabin, on Fossola canal, where is still in use a great fishing net. Here we listen to a lot of fishermen’s stories, we record naif poems and songs and look at a strange collection of photos.

Near Fossola there is a magic place: Torre d’Oglio, where the time seems to stand still. Here floats on the river an old boat-bridge, the last of this kind in the whole Old Europe (wrote the journalist Paolo Rumiz). We speak with a skilled pontonier, Odone Rondelli, about traditional bridge-works.

In July we visit the new watermill simulacrum and the “Po Museum” in Revere. Then we go to the little sanctuary devoted to the Blessed Virgin of La Comuna. Here we can value the spiritual influence of popular devotion over the country-life of the common people settled nearby the river.

At Assumption Day we assist in Brancere, another lonely place on the banks of Po, at a fluvial rite where the Virgin Mary is worshipped like the protectress of river and nature.

In Autumn we are on the right side of Po, at Fortino (S. Benedetto Po), with the young poetess Giorgia Bottani and her friends (old boatmen and fishermen), listening to her dialectal poem Sabièra and to their idle talks upon sturgeons and alluvions.

Autumn is also the ploughing season, and sometimes, under the plough, buried treasures come out from the ground.

So we remember an old manuscript “on hidden treasures” written in XIX century by Giuseppe Bodini, school teacher and occult science scholar, born in 1821 at Pescarolo. We meet the last Bodini’s heir, Alessandro Camerini (born in 1921), and we visit the places between Oglio and Po rivers described in Bodini’s manuscript and maps: we go to the small country-church Senigola and to the Sidolo, a desolated dairy-farm. In the rice country washed by Mincio river we meet a folk-storyteller, Berta Bassi, and we listen to her incredibile tales.

At Christmas we meet in Viadana the old ballad-singer Pietro Borettini (Pédar) and look at his wanderful Crib, full of characters conformed to real people he had known.

In January we go in another river-little-town, Dosolo, to meet the veterinary-surgeon and cinemaker Guido Lupi. He shows us a video-interview with Cici Remagni, an old carpenter living in Pomponesco. Cici speaks of his deep love for birds, insects and all other animals of the river. At the end of his interview, Cici Remagni tells the traditional Merla’s legend, happened during the last three days of January, by tradition, the coldest of the whole year.

At 29-30-31 January we are in Crotta d’Adda, to document the nightly-singing-ritual La Merla, inspired by the legend about this bird. The diary of our field-research is rich of oral witnesses, literary quotations and canorous transcriptions.

The last pages of La Fiuma bring forward a short report about another seasonal and zoological rite: the Carnival of Pidrüs in Poggio Rusco. A whimsical Carnival, lately dacayed and “denatured”.