Archeologia del gioco degli scacchi nel medioevo occidentale. Nuovi manufatti in Italia

The game of chess is one of the many Islamic contributions to Western European culture and its introduction in Western Medieval courts exalts its social and intellectual level. The standardisation of the rules by Alfonso X of Castile and, previously, the De ludo Scachorum by Jacopo da Cessole favoured the spreading of chess as an aristocratic game. Compared to the number of treatises and literary texts where the chessboard is interpreted as a metaphor of the social space and its regulations, the extant artefacts are scanty and mostly known from museum collections, thus detached from their context of use. The finding of two pawns from two different sets in Cencelle (Lazio), in medieval stratigraphies, provides the occasion for a reflection on the contribution of the archaeological research to understanding these artefacts and their contexts of use. At the same time, the latter appear relevant to reasoning on the multi-cultural dynamics occurring in the Latial coast at the end of the Middle Ages.