My friend just told me about passar battaglia [from Italian, “to dodge the fight”]. The former rule that a pawn could evade capture by an opposing pawn by its initial two-square advance, in contrast to the en passant rule. Passar battaglia remained the practice in several parts of Europe long after en passant was introduced, and it was not completely abandoned until 1880 when Italy adopted the en passant rule.
What sort of backwards ass rule is this?
What Wikipedia fails to mention is the true reason for why Italy stopped following “passar battaglia”. Many scholars believed it was due to international pressure to follow the more common “en passant” when in fact it was largely due to more efficient production and subsequent adoption of bricks in Italy, thereby enabling games involving “passar battaglia” to conclude with a bricked pipi. Previously, the dearth of bricks allowed “passar battaglia” to occur without bricking the players pipi.
As Italians didn’t like having their pipis bricked, they adopted “en passant” and dropped “passar battaglia”.
