The italian guppy scene.

The diffusion of show-qualty guppies in Italy is only very recent. The first show-quality guppies arrived in Italy between 1999 and 2000 imported by Gennaro Nuzzo, who visited a EU contest show and Marco Rosetti, who attendend the WGA. One the strains that Marco brought back, the snakeskin doublesowrd, is still around and one of the best strain we have in Italy still.

It is only in late 2003 that the interest for guppies however became more widespread. During that year several people, including myself, imported the highest quality stock from breeders such as Luke Roebuck, Frank Chang and Gernot Knaden. These imports originated the four most popular and best quality strain we have in Italy at the moment: the HB yellows, Blue Moscow, Blond Red and Platinum mosaic.

The epicentre of guppy breeding in Italy is few km around the city of Ferrara. This is certainly due to the effort of Renato Zamboni, a long-time breeder (his father was a commercial breeder of goldfishes in the ’50) who now is a wholesaler. I infected him with show guppies in 2003 and now half of his entire set-up (which means many cubic meters of water!) are filled with guppies. He was soon followed by hi fellow Pietro Bolognesi who, with over 100 tanks, owns the largest private fishroom of the entire country. The inevitable result of such a high variety of show guppies concentrated in one city is that quite a number of small breeders in the neighbourhood now keep show-quality guppies.

Italian breeders are now able to reach respectable results in the European scene. The only two times that an Italian delegations sent fishes to European Shows (in Amboise and Prague) last year the had several trios going over 80 points. Particularly high quality are the blue moscows (Hawaiian stock), HB yellows and gold reds.

However, Italians are notoriously anarchists and the Italian breeder finds keeping pure strains a very boring task. So Italians like to experiment with new crosses. Particularly popular crosses here are the crosses of the japan blue and of the platinum due to the strong penetrance of the Y-linked traits. Albinos are also very appreciated. Italians in general are more attracted by bright colours than by perfect shapes and the dream of every single breeder in this country is to create his very own strain. For these reasons, Italians are maybe more akin to the Asian than to the European breeders.

In this article you will find a selection of fishes form the last Italian championship which I find interesting for the combination of colour. Unfortunately, while many good triangles are to be found in Italy, we still lack high-quality double swords. I hope this will be rectified soon.

Considering that Italy is a warm country –for European standards- and in the South it is possible to keep guppy outdoors for six and more months during the year, I anticipate that new variety will come out of this country in a near future. Also, Italians have no “tradition” and keep American, European and Asian stockswithout biases, which certainly helps in the creative process.

The first International show was held in Bologna during the first weekend of June 2005. I will report on that in due time.

Alessandro