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AFV Beltrame Group in support of the exhibition “La battaglia di due re con finte schiere” at Biblioteca Bertoliana in Vicenza

AFV Beltrame Group supports the exhibition “La battaglia di due re con finte schiere”, inaugurated on November 26 and open until December 19, with free entry, in the exhibition halls of Palazzo Cordellina in Vicenza, home of the Bertoliana Civic Library.

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A rare collection of universal chess literature will be exhibited to the public for the first time. These are precious handwritten and printed works, dated between the 13th and 19th centuries.

On display, alongside the chess treatises that have marked the history of the game in Europe, you can also admire the splendid miniature that decorates the Bible by copyist Cambius Vicentinus, donated to the Bertoliana Library in 2016 by Antonio, Angiola and Patrizia Beltrame, sons of engineer Giancarlo.

A small illuminated scene depicts a cleric and a layman playing chess; it is one of the first representations of a chess game known to date; it was made in France in the third quarter of the 13th century, in the years when the most pious king Louis IX forbade the game of chess.

“If you were to describe my father, Engineer Giancarlo Beltrame, as a collector, with just one adjective, you should use the term” eclectic “- underlined Patrizia Beltrame, Vice President of AFV Beltrame Group – However, the limits of a definition are immediately evident. Who neglects the fil rouge, invisible but very present, which linked the books, which he loved to surround himself with, to the most disparate objects, mostly scientific but not only, acquired by him with intelligence and passion. His main characteristic was precisely this: to be a wide-ranging collector, without preconceptions and limitations, but always guided by his very personal curiosities. The books he bought, ancient and modern, he read them all, stacking them on the table next to his armchair or bed: thus the “heretic” Galileo probably came to find himself next to the Bible which is exhibited at the Bertoliana for the representation of a game chess. Dad, as a cultured patron from Vicenza, certainly understood the implications of the ingenious juxtaposition of game and battle, a synthetic representation of life itself “.