Ricerc@Sapienza

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.