The Italian Game: Chess's Quiet Opening Keeps Coming Back
By Cameron W. · Tue, 03 Nov 2026
From Damiano and the Evans Gambit to today’s grandmasters, how the “quiet game” kept coming back. Opening Stories #4: the Italian Game.
Some openings arrive with a bang. The Italian Game arrived with a shrug and a pointed bishop, and it has been outlasting the loud ones ever since. After 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6, White plays 3.Bc4, aiming straight at the weakest square in Black's camp, f7. It is among the oldest ideas in the modern game, it was a darling of the romantic era, it spent decades dismissed as too tame, and today it sits near the heart of elite chess again. This is the fourth story in our series on the openings that shaped the game.
The "quiet game" with a very old pedigree
The Italian was in the game from nearly the beginning. It appears among the openings analyzed in the Göttingen manuscript, regarded as the earliest known work on modern chess. In the sixteenth century the Portuguese master Pedro Damiano and the Italian Giulio Polerio worked on it, and Chess.com notes that Damiano's 1512 book covers it. A century later, Gioachino Greco gave it a long analytical workout in his game collection of 1620, building the old main line with 4.c3 and the central strike d4.
The name "Giuoco Piano" means "quiet game" in Italian. According to Wikipedia, it first described non-gambit openings, in the spirit of the Modenese school, which preferred healthy development to early sacrifices. English writers of the early nineteenth century attached the label to the line 3...Bc5, and the broader "Italian Game" label was promoted in 1977 by Tim Harding and George Botterill, who argued that "quiet" was a poor description of so many sharp variations.
Captain Evans and the gambit that lit up a century
Then came the Welsh sea captain William Davies Evans. According to ChessBase, he proposed 4.b4, a pawn offered on the very next move to buy time and attack, and Wikipedia records the first known game, Evans against McDonnell in London in 1827, with a slightly different move order. The first published analysis came from William Lewis in 1832, and the gambit was played several times in the La Bourdonnais and McDonnell matches in 1834.
From there it became a favorite of the attacking age. Paul Morphy played it extensively, and Adolf Anderssen used it in one of the most celebrated games ever played, the Evergreen Game against Jean Dufresne in 1852. If you have never played through it, it is one of the great pleasures of chess history, and Garry Kasparov later annotated it himself, according to ChessBase.
Too calm for the new age
Fashions turn, though. Wikipedia notes that by the 1880s Henry Bird was already observing that the opening was falling out of favor, and Emanuel Lasker's handling of the Evans, giving back the pawn on good terms, damaged it badly. Black's defenses improved, and the Ruy Lopez, with its patient long-term pressure, took over as White's main weapon against 1...e5. Bobby Fischer, to give one telling example, played the Evans in a casual game against Reuben Fine at Fine's home, but never in a classical tournament game, according to ChessBase.
The quiet comeback
The revival began with a slower idea. In the Giuoco Pianissimo, "the very quiet game," White plays d3 and builds up without rushing to open the center. Wikipedia says it grew in popularity in the 1980s, and that Anatoly Karpov used it twice in the 1981 World Championship match. Then came a larger shift. When Vladimir Kramnik revived the Berlin Defense against Kasparov in their 2000 match, White players around the world went looking for alternatives, and the calm Italian suddenly looked very attractive.
By October 2020, American grandmaster Joel Benjamin wrote in Chess Life that the Italian had "quite possibly surpassed the Ruy Lopez" as the elite choice against 1...e5. Its plans resemble Ruy Lopez ideas, he explained, with livelier bishop play. Wikipedia lists a long line of top names who have played it, including Karpov, Kasparov, Kramnik, Anand, Carlsen and Nepomniachtchi, and Chess.com says Anish Giri, Wesley So and Maxime Vachier-Lagrave still choose the Giuoco Piano with White.
One famous detour
And the gambit? It still shows up as a surprise. In 1995, at the Tal Memorial in Riga, Kasparov beat Viswanathan Anand with it in 25 moves, and later that year beat Jeroen Piket in 29, according to ChessBase. It sparked a brief revival and, as ChessBase tells it, he never played it with White again.
That, to me, is the Italian Game in a nutshell: modest in its manner, deep in its history, and always ready for one more comeback.
