How the Rome list is compiled

Purpose and scope

The guide covers Rome and the municipalities of its metropolitan city, from the Castelli Romani to the coast and the lakes to the north. It is meant for a player who has just moved to the city, a parent looking for a course, a visitor with a free evening, and anyone who needs to know whether a club listed somewhere online still exists.

Nothing here is rated or ranked, no entry is paid for and none is recommended over another. Lists show first the entries whose chess is confirmed or announced, newest evidence first, and after them the entries that could not be confirmed.

What is read for each card

The starting point is the Italian chess federation’s register of affiliated societies for the province of Rome, which gives each club’s name and address. The federation’s events calendar and the event pages of the Lazio regional committee show which organisers actually ran tournaments and where; the international list of rated tournaments shows that those events were played. Each club’s own website is read for hours, courses and news, and school circulars, city pages and guidebooks fill in the few entries that are not clubs.

Every fact on a card carries a small number that leads to the page stating it, with a short quotation in the original Italian and the day the page was read. A card has two status lines. The place line says whether the venue is open, closed or unknown. The chess line gives the date of the newest sign of chess there; a date still ahead is shown as announced, since a notice is not yet a game played.

When two sources disagree, for instance when the register gives one address and the club’s site another, or two calendars name different halls for the same tournament, the card shows both and says which page says what.

Three kinds of source

A source is marked official when it comes from the place itself, its organiser or a federation body; secondary when a third party such as a newspaper, a guidebook or a city listing reports it; unverified when it is user-posted material or a claim found in one spot only.

The mark tells you who is speaking, not whether they are right. A federation register can list a club that no longer meets, and a guidebook can be the only page that mentions chess at a bar. Weigh the mark together with the date beside it.

Gaps are left as gaps

Most Roman clubs do not publish their fees, and few say in writing whether a visitor may walk in. Where no page states a fact, the card reads “not stated by sources”. It does not mean no, free, or closed; it means nobody wrote it down where it could be read.

Anyone who can point to a page that fills such a gap is welcome to send it through the form. It goes onto the card, dated, at the following revision.

What this guide does not assess

• No place, teacher or tournament is given a grade, a score or a position in a ranking.
• Nobody from the guide has been to the venues; the cards rest on published pages only.
• Fees and prices are repeated as published on the day of reading and are not checked at the door.
• Club hours come from the clubs’ own pages and can change faster than the cards are revised.
• The quality of teaching is not judged, and an instructor’s title is checked only against the FIDE profile.
• Accessibility, safety, heating, parking and similar practical matters are not examined.
• Attendance is not counted: a card cannot tell you how many people come on a given evening.
• An empty field means that the sources are silent, never that the answer is negative.

If the card is about you

Presidents, secretaries, organisers, instructors and ordinary members can all correct a card through the report or add form. A link to the page where the right information is published makes the correction quick to confirm. Messages are gathered and worked through when the Rome list is next revised.

Each correction is entered with its date in the change log and shown on the card it concerns. A club or venue that would prefer not to appear can say so, with its reasons, through the same form.

Reading dates and revisions

The pages behind the present cards were read between 12 October 2026 and 12 October 2026. The date next to each source on a card shows how old that particular fact is.

The whole list is meant to be read again roughly every 6 months. In the meantime a club may change its evening or its room without the card following. Every revision of the data or of these rules goes into the change log, newest entry first, and past entries stay as they were written.

Who is behind it

Chess in Rome is an independent editorial project. It takes no money from clubs, organisers, schools or shops, carries no advertising for them and belongs to no federation or association.

It exists because the information is scattered across registers, calendars and club sites that each show one piece. The form on this site is the way to reach the project; no personal address is published.

The data, for reuse

The complete list can be downloaded as a JSON dataset, one record per entry with all its sources, marks and dates. The licence is named in the file itself.

A plain-text outline of the site for language models and other programs is kept at llms.txt.

Looked at and not listed

Entries considered and left out: 12. Typical reasons are a single event with no second edition, an online-only community, a club listed by the regional committee but based outside the metropolitan city of Rome, a duplicate of an existing card, or a lead whose only page could not be opened or carried no year. The dataset gives every one of them by name with the reason.

Map points

A card shows a map point when a source provides one or when the address can be found in the OpenStreetMap address search. A point found by address search is labelled approximate, because it can land a few house numbers away from the real entrance.

Points are never set by hand, the site draws no map of its own, and the map link opens openstreetmap.org. Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, under the Open Database License (ODbL).