Valentina Tamborra builds a very particular bridge between Italy and Norway using cod fishing as a connection.

The photographer retraces the traces of the journey made in the fifteenth century by the noble Venetian merchant Pietro Querini who, shipwrecked in the Lofoten Islands, discovered the hospitality of the fishermen and the merits of the fish that he exported to his city.
The photographer does not limit herself to observing the life of those islands but investigates, studies, shares stories, effort, joys in a visual story that focuses on people and expands on astonishing landscapes dotted with cod drying structures that her lens transforms in suggestive installations.


“In the ancient Viking tongue, “å skrida” means “to travel, to migrate, to move forward”: from this expression the term skrei is derived.
The skrei is a particular type of Norwegian cod, which each year completes a veritable migration from the Barents Sea towards its breeding grounds in the warmer waters off the northern Norwegian coast.
And the journey itself is the common thread connecting the story of a fish with the story of courageous men. A story of migration, exploration, and discovery, which, beginning in Venice and passing through Rome, finished beyond the Arctic Circle, in Norway’s Lofoten Islands.

A journey of many kilometres, through distant eras and worlds that are nevertheless connected to one another, and where food forms a bond between peoples. The departure point is a fifteenth-century diary preserved in the Vatican Apostolic Library, the first “travel reportage” dedicated to northern Norway, which reveals the life of the fishermen in that remote part of the world. Writing it in his own hand was Pietro Querini, Venetian nobleman and merchant, shipwrecked along with his crew off the coasts of the then-unknown Lofoten Islands in 1432.Out of this disaster arose the indissoluble bond that ties Italy to Norway: a terrible event transformed into an opportunity to bring peoples and cultures together.
It is the encounter that guides this journey, which from Rome passed through Venice, Svolvær, Henningsvær and, finally, Røst, the westernmost island in the County of Nordland. Through the stories of a descendent of Pietro Querini who keeps alive the memory of his ancestor and shares his ideals of brotherhood and generosity, we come to stories of fishermen in a land of extremes, dominated by the rhythms of nature and where fish are practically the only source of livelihood; of a fish market that is the beating heart of Venice and stands on the ruins of the Querini family palazzo; of a “poor” fish, at home in the ice and the wind, that becomes a delicacy of Italian cuisine.

“Skrei – The Journey” is, first and foremost, the story of a friendship: between men– and between worlds.
Beyond the Arctic Circle, all the way to Italy.”
- Valentina Tamborra