The Importance of Not Being Arcovazzi

As maybe you know, International Master Clarice Benini – who finished second in the Women’s World Championship at Stockholm 1937 – did not participate in the 7th Women’s World Chess Championship at Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1939 and, as a matter of fact, she did not take part in any remarkable tournament until the end of World War II, because of her “volunteering” in the farcical and tragic wargames of Italian fascist regime. She even served as a nurse on the Russian front, and when coming back home on a short leave, she could always rely upon the regime’s fanfare about its colonial triumph, as, for instance, quoted in Firenze: Rassegna del Comune, which listed her among “the six valiant Ladies of the Red Cross who gave their fraternal care to the wounded on the battlefields. Their names are: Maria Rita Orzalesi, Maria Teresa Caccia, Bianca Bargioni, Clarice Benini, Lidia Sequal Baldasseroni, and Laura Parelli. The Florentine fascist women offered them wonderful bouquets of flowers”. Curiously enough, when several years later Miss Benini decided to participate in the 8th Women's World Chess Championship in the winter of 1949-1950 in Moscow, Russia, the same Comune di Firenze (for which she worked) did not give her the permission to leave to Soviet Union and threatened to fire her if she ventured to disobey its order. Arcovazzi’s ghost in the postwar Italy. But this time the middle-aged Florentine spinster – everyone in Florence called her “Benini girl” – found the courage she never had before and took a fifteen-day train trip to Moscow. It will be her last participation in a Women’s World Chess Championship Tournament. Her prime was behind her, but once again her brilliant attacking style did not go unnoticed. She particularly played like a tiger with the four Soviet players, winning against Elisaveta Ivanovna Bykova and Valentina Mikhaylovna Borisenko-Belova, drawing (a won game) with Olga Nikolaevna Rubtsova, and losing (a dramatic and furious fight) only to the Women’s World Chess Champion in fieri Lyudmila Vladimirovna Rudenko.