The 35 anglers who will compete at Bass Pro Shops REDCREST Presented by Mercury & Lowrance took a variety of paths to qualify for the championship event. But only one involved crossing an ocean.
For the first time, an angler was able to qualify for REDCREST in 2026 through the MLF International ranks. Italy’s Luca Della Ciana won the International Division at the 2025 Toyota Series Championship on Grand Lake, which earned him a spot in the field on Table Rock Lake. Della Ciana called the chance to compete in REDCREST “the realization of a lifelong dream.”
It would be easy to dismiss his chances of actually contending for the $300,000 top prize. After all, Della Ciana isn’t a professional angler, and he’ll be competing from a borrowed boat in a foreign country, roughly 5,000 miles away from home.
But Della Ciana and the rest of the Team Italy showed last fall on a nearby Ozark lake what those paying attention to international competition have known for a while: The Italians can catch ’em.
Giovanni Ceccarelli won the co-angler competition at the Toyota Series Championship, and the Italians accounted for the top two International Division finishers on the boater side and three of the top four co-anglers. Winning the $10,000 prize and REDCREST berth was just the latest accomplishment on Della Ciana’s stout international fishing résumé. He won the gold medal at the Black Bass World Championships alongside partner Jimmy Ashlock in both 2023 and 2024, topping fields that included the likes of Jacob Wheeler and Scott Martin. The duo finished third at the 2025 World Championships (which was won by Bass Pro Tour pros Ott DeFoe and Drew Gill).
Now, Della Ciana will represent Italy on his biggest stage yet.
Skills forged from tough fishing
Eddy Peruzzo, the co-founder and president of MLF Italy, said bass fishing is low on the list of popular Italian pastimes. There are no full-time pros in the country. And the fishing, he admitted, “is not the best.”
“Italy is very good for lots of things: For the food, for the stories, for holidays,” Peruzzo said. “But not for bass fishing.”
That’s precisely why he thinks the country has developed into a force at international competitions. Peruzzo and Della Ciana explained that Italy only has two large lakes that offer decent bass fishing – Lakes Bolsena and Garda. In a country of about 60 million, that means those fisheries, and the other small lakes and ponds where bass swim, face intense fishing pressure. That has forced Italian anglers to stay on the cutting edge with new techniques and hone the details of their presentations to trick wary bass into biting.
“Unlike in the United States, where vast waters allow for a pattern-based approach – finding a specific technique and replicating it across huge areas – Italian lakes are small and face extreme fishing pressure,” Della Ciana said via email. “We have to be capable of catching every single fish present in a spot by obsessing over the smallest details.”
Despite the lack of abundant bass habitat, Ceccarelli said Italy offers a versatile range of fisheries – dirty water, clean water, shallow cover, offshore structure. And because there aren’t many places to catch a bass, there’s no specializing in Italy – no one who only uses power tactics shallow or targets suspended fish with forward-facing sonar. Anglers must learn to do it all.
“In Italy, we have so many situations to fish,” Ceccarelli said. “We have a lot of different lakes, like (reservoirs) and natural lakes, volcanic lakes. That’s really a situation for every scenario. So, we have a lot of different kinds of waters – muddy water, clear water. A lot of different scenarios. And depending on the season, we fish with a very large amount of baits.”
The results speak for themselves. Not only have Della Ciana and Ashlock won gold at two World Championship events, the Italian team has finished third four years in a row in four different countries (Lake Murray in 2022, Portugal’s Sabor Lake in 2023, Italy’s Bolsena Lake in 2024, South Africa’s Arabie Dam in 2025). No other nation has hit the podium all four years.
Fred Roumbanis, who has competed as a touring pro for more than 20 years, fished against Della Ciana at both the 2023 and ’24 Black Bass World Championships. He came away impressed with how knowledgeable the Italian anglers were about the American bass fishing scene and how technically sound they were on the water.
“I can tell you right now that them going to Table Rock, I think he’ll be a force to be reckoned with,” Roumbanis said. “I would not bet against him. Because he’ll bring something new, and their lakes are very clear. (Italian anglers) are good with suspended bass; they’re very good and educated with LiveScope. They can pretty much do it all.”
Road to REDCREST went through Grand
While not technically a professional angler, Della Ciana built his life around bass fishing. He works for a company that builds custom aluminum boats, and he offers guide trips on the side. He spends more than 200 days a year on the water.
Della Ciana owns a fully rigged bass boat with a Mercury outboard and the latest electronics. He competes annually in MLF Italy’s tournament circuit, which is where his long road to REDCREST started.
MLF Italy offers two pathways to the Toyota Series Championship: a four-event circuit for anglers with combustion engines and a 10-event trolling-motor-only tour. The top two anglers in the points across the four traditional events earn spots in the Toyota Series Championship as boaters, while the top two trolling-motor-only anglers (Peruzzo said those events are more popular, frequently drawing more than 200 boats) earn berths as co-anglers.
Della Ciana has become a mainstay for Team Italy at the Toyota Series Championship. Last year marked his fourth time competing in the event as a boater to go along with two appearances as a co-angler. In fact, one of his previous appearances as a boater came on Table Rock in 2023.
Della Ciana said that experience competing in the U.S. helped prepare him for Grand. While he did as much homework as he could from afar, studying maps and watching YouTube videos, he wasn’t able to get on on-the-water reps in a similar scenario. Few Italian fisheries have boat docks, which is the primary cover on Grand. And the only two that can remotely compare in size set up drastically different. Bolsena is a volcanic lake – essentially a giant bowl – while Garda is a mountain reservoir in the Alps with a maximum depth over 1,100 feet.
The biggest thing Della Ciana focused on leading up to the event was adopting a different mindset than he’s used to. Even fishing tough, as it did in November, Grand offered so much more productive water than Italian fisheries that he had to figure out where to focus his time before he could begin picking it apart.
“I’ve learned to think like an American angler,” he said. “Instead of just hunting for individual fish, I looked for the ideal situation. I focused on scenarios that play to my strengths, such as clear-water fishing using live sonar, identifying areas where the shad were present. Only after locating the baitfish did I begin a surgical search for the most key spots.”
During practice, it didn’t take Della Ciana long to find some productive areas that fit his strengths. He located a couple creeks on the lower end of the lake that had clean water and plentiful shad. He said he caught 14 to 15 pounds per day during practice, which would have won the event had he been able to replicate it during competition.
Della Ciana wound up catching twin limits of 11-11 each of the first two days. He mixed jigs around docks with strolling and walking topwaters for schooling fish. The key, he said, was finding large groups of bass that would compete over his baits, especially when they corralled shad up shallow.
“I had located several strategic docks situated in bait-rich areas and positioned in the shade,” he said. “These structures held impressive schools of bass, sometimes up to 100 fish. This setup allowed me to trigger multiple reaction bites, bypassing the issue of lethargic fish. Additionally, I found a few specific situations at the end of the creeks where the bass were pushing shad into ultra-shallow water. In those spots, casting precision became vital to intercept them on the surface with topwater as soon as they turned on.”
Della Ciana sat second in the International Division after Day 1 but more than 2 pounds behind fellow Italian Leonardo Benassi. His consistency won out, as Benassi mustered just 8-9 on Day 2. Della Ciana’s total of 23-6 put him first among the 13 international boaters in the field and 46th out of 172 total anglers.
Della Ciana said he wasn’t surprised the REDCREST berth came down to the two Italians. When he found out at the Day 2 weigh-in that he’d prevailed, he didn’t know how to react.
“For us Europeans, (REDCREST) represents the absolute pinnacle of professional fishing,” he said. “There are no words that can truly describe the emotion I’m feeling.”
“For us Europeans, (REDCREST) represents the absolute pinnacle of professional fishing. There are no words that can truly describe the emotion I’m feeling.”
– Luca Della Ciana
On the cusp of another dream
Della Ciana will arrive for official practice on Table Rock with quite a bit more familiarity with the fishery than he did on Grand. Not only has he competed there before, he also spent some time pre-practicing on the fishery before it went off-limits. And he once again plans to do as much homework as possible from afar.
“I am studying every map detail and all available video footage online to arrive with a deep understanding of the lake,” he said.
Just competing on the same stage as the top touring anglers is a dream. But it also brings Della Ciana within reach of his ultimate goal: to compete as a full-time pro in America.
“I want to prove that an Italian angler can hold his own among the greats,” he said.
It’s been done by an Italian before. Jacopo Gallelli competed on the Tackle Warehouse Pro Circuit from 2021-23 and the Bass Pro Tour in 2024. He won a Pro Circuit event on the Potomac River in 2021 and finished second in a BPT event on Lake Champlain a few weeks later.
Della Ciana believes he has the bass-catching chops to contend with the best anglers in the world. The bigger hurdle is finding the funding that would allow him to quit his job, move to America and travel all over the country chasing bass. Della Ciana said he’s “well aware” of how challenging that would be.
Winning $300,000 and attracting the attention of sponsors by winning REDCREST would go a long way toward making his dream come true.
“My goal is to keep growing and competing against the very best,” he said. “I participate in many international events every year, from the World Championships to the Toyota Series, and I feel I now have the maturity and the skills to compete consistently at the highest global levels. America is the pinnacle of our sport, and becoming a professional angler in the United States would be the crowning achievement of a lifetime.”