Blowin’ in the Wind

Today, I went downtown Florence for my last minute Christmas shopping and I stopped for a while at laFeltrinelli bookstore in Via Cerretani. Among other things, I just took a look at the chess books. Not many survived the Internet revolution (about a dozen), and only a few of them (pictured above on the left) were placed on the second shelf of a wall bookcase mostly devoted to hobbies and leisures. Many things have changed throughout the years, and cookbooks are nowadays far more fashionable than chess treaties. But what a joy to see that General Ugo Pasquinelli’s everlasting handbook “ABC degli Scacchi” (The ABC of Chess Game), which first edition was in 1927, still stands over others as a monolith. Well, maybe his analysis were not always irreproachable, but whenever you read his words of admiration for the metaphysics of Morphy, Capablanca, Alekhine and Lasker, you really could feel and understand why Tarrasch once wrote that “Chess, like love, like music, has the power to make men happy”.