The Italian Championship Chess opened yesterday, Tuesday 23, in a room at Hotel Athena in Siena. Siena lovers are in luck: the tournament (12 players, who will meet in a round robin tournament for a total of 11 rounds of play) is very strong, with the presence of 7 in the first 9 Italian players, including the Italian champion and real monument of our own chess, Grandmaster Michele Godena of Treviso and the young Grandmaster Sabino Brunello, author of the recent excellent performances that have definitely thrown towards professionalism. But above all the way to the championship sees Fabiano Caruana, the boy just turned eighteen, to an Italian mother and American father, the world's No. 1 his age and in the first 30 in the world rankings, who managed to arouse a curiosity and an interest in chess in Italy we had not seen the heroic days of the Fischer-Spassky match of the seventies.
But that chess in our country are booming and not merely related to the presence of Caruana itself shows the trend in the first round of play: not only Denis Rombaldoni Pesaro, No. 5 Italian, who was also just twenty-one, won with great authority against International Master Pierluigi Piscopo of Lecce, but, in what was surely the most exciting match of the round, Alessandro Bonafede, Italian champion under 20, has held off for over 5 hours to Caruana, forcing it to end to balance in a complex of towers and the final shape: an extraordinary achievement, which testifies to the richness of our nursery.
is therefore worthwhile to spend the Hotel Athena: there are no tickets to be paid, just to observe a strict silence, and you can all follow closely matches many specimens of a very unique and probably unrepeatable event for our city .
(Mark Bettalli)
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