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テーマ： By Italian Staff

2017.08.24

Marostica “the town of the Chess”

Hello Bloggers,

Do you like to play chess? Yes? Good! So what do you think about coming to see a chess game where the pieces consisting of real people and the square board is the whole square of a small town?
All this is really possible and it is located in the Veneto region, in Marostica, a small town in the province of Vicenza.

It is world-renowned for the chess game that takes place every 2 years, in the second weekend of September, with live characters in the town square.
It is a tradition launched in 1923 and is inspired by an event of 1454, although it is not There are historical evidence. For this historic event the Vicenza town is also nicknamed "the town of the chess".

It is probably the most famous chess game in Italy, although almost nobody knows who wins it. Perhaps because the chessboard is important, on the central square of the castle, and even more important are the human pieces, appearing in Renaissance costumes, called to recall a chess game that in the fifteenth century aroused the onset of a war.

At that time, Marostica was an ally of Venice. Two knights fell in love both with the daughter of the governor of Marostica, and for her they defied duel. The governor, who did not want to embezzle any of the two, decided that he would give the daughter to the one who had won a chess match held with living pieces in the square. The defeated knight would become anyway the governor’s relative by marrying the younger sister of the girl.

Nowadays, in memory of this event, the game is re-launched every two years. Not being able to reproduce the lost original moves of the two contenders, they decide to play with the classic moves of the chess. The pieces are the king, the queen, the rooks, the bishops, the knights and the pawns.

During the three-day event, there are about six hundred engaged players: ladies and knights who, together with the characters of the board, and booths, dancers, jugglers, firefighters, musicians and comedians, give birth to a spectacular show.