The Queen of Italy caught 268 trout in one day!
Well, at least that’s what American newspapers were telling their readers one hundred years ago today. That sounded like a lot like, so I looked into it, and it only got better.
I’m Chris, and this is Hidden Lens History. Every day, I open the newspaper from exactly one hundred years ago, find something worth sharing, and follow the story as far as I can.
It’s September 18th, 1926, and I found the Queen of Italy fishing. On the front page. And not just as a PR stunt. She was apparently out there destroying her family in a fishing competition.
The story appeared on the front page of dozens of papers that day.
“QUEEN OF ITALY GOOD FISHERMAN.”
“QUEEN OF ITALY WINS ROYAL FISHING CONTEST”
“QUEEN HOOKS ‘EM”
In the Covington Virginian newspaper, it’s sandwiched between a story about a husband and wife finding a robber in their bed, and another about two separate towns battling scanty swimsuits and what they called the ‘cult of nakedness.’ Which, of course both were also good candidates for today.
But back to our fishing Queen.
Apparently the Italian royal family had been staying in the Alps, at Sant’Anna di Valdieri, and somebody decided to hold a fishing competition.
The rules were simple: One day, and the most trout wins. And according to the United Press report, Queen Elena caught 268. Her husband, King Victor Emmanuel III? 179.
Her five children? Princess Yolanda reportedly caught 153. Princess Giovanna, 148. Princess Maria Francesca caught 86. Princess Mafalda caught 31. And Prince Umberto, as the papers put it, “had to be content with only 16 fish in his creel.”
On a day when the great Miami hurricane was the main story all over the country, I love that they still found the space to report on a possibly made up royal fishing contest across the Atlantic.
Let’s be honest, 268 trout is absurd. That’s two fish every two minutes if you fish for nine hours straight. But given the very specific numbers reported, I had to know if it was true.
Come to find out, Queen Elena was a fisherman. As were many queens apparently. After searching “Queen” and “Fishing” on Newspapers.com, I found the exiled Queen of Greece was also quite the angler.
As for Queen Elena of Italy, the place mentioned in the newspaper is in the Gesso Valley in the Italian Alps. And the Italian royal family’s connection to that place goes back decades, way before Elena.
In 1855, King Victor Emmanuel II visited the area and was apparently so taken with it that local communities eventually transferred over hunting and fishing rights.
The family established a royal hunting reserve there and built a summer residence at Sant’Anna di Valdieri. Years later, Elena married into that family, and became Queen of Italy in 1900.
And after searching around, I found some things that make that 268 number even more believable.
First, Elena didn’t just like fishing. She was obsessed with it. A history of the area says she owned an arsenal of rods, reels, hooks, and lures, and that she knew all the good trout spots every year.
And then there’s this illustration. It’s of Queen Elena, specifically fishing in Valle Gesso in 1906, twenty years before today’s newspaper story. She’s there holding the rod herself, with her children nearby, in the exact same valley where this 1926 fishing contest would have taken place.
There’s another story from 1925 that says she wanted to reach a fishing spot below a waterfall so badly that she had herself tied to a tree. She even reportedly had a device called a trotimetro for keeping count of all the fish she caught.
Which suddenly makes today’s newspaper story a lot more credible. Because it doesn’t just say Elena caught 268 trout. It says she won a fishing contest. And according to this later history of fishing in the region, that is something they did. Apparently, the King was not always thrilled with how good his wife was at it.
There was even a royal fishing scoreboard. The dining room at their summer house reportedly had large silver plaques on the walls, one for each year, showing the biggest trout caught that season. The name of the person who caught it was recorded along with the date and size of fish. Elena’s name kept showing up.
There’s also a surviving record from the summer of 1924, showing the royal family’s trout catches. And the largest trout on that record was of course, Elena’s.
The place itself remembers her for it. The modern Maritime Alps park describes the lower Sella Lake as one of the royal family’s favorite places to fish. There’s even an old painted inscription there that reads “W la regina” — “Long live the Queen”
Turns out, Queen Elena was absolutely a fisherman, and the claim of 268 trout in one day. Ok, we’ll give it to her.
But looking around I also found her in the papers that same day in another headline. Just to give us some context about what else was going on. An Australian paper ran a story about bobbed hair titled, “Truth About Bobbing—Queen of Italy’s Ban.”
Apparently reports had been circulating that women with bobbed hair were being kept out of the Italian royal court. The article is trying to figure out whether this supposed royal ban was even true.
Bobbed hair in 1926 was absolutely a thing that could become international news. But honestly, neither of these stories today are that important. Italy had a king. Mussolini was in power. There was plenty happening in Europe that all ended up in the history books.
But what I find interesting is seeing that people were also reading these kind of things. The weird little things people were talking about all while the big events were happening around them. And also thinking about Crown Prince Umberto, somewhere in Italy hoping everybody would move on to the haircut story and stop printing his fishing score.
See you tomorrow - Chris