Explicit analysis of positive dimensional fibres of Pg,r and Xiao conjecture

We focus on the positive dimensional fibres of the Prym map Pg,r. We present a direct procedure to investigate infinitely many examples of positive dimensional fibres. Such procedure uses families of Galois coverings of the line admitting a 2-sheeted Galois intermediate quotient. Then we generalize to families of Galois coverings of the line admitting a Galois intermediate quotient of higher degree and we show that the higher degree analogue of the aforementioned procedure gives all the known counterexamples to a conjecture by Xiao on the relative irregularity of a fibration.