As I went through their essays, I could not but feel inwardly pleased with my job. I am talking about the essays I asked my pupils to write at the end of our chess course, in which they described their feelings, their thoughts, and the benefits chess brought to them. The reader might think that many teachers ask children to write essays, so there is nothing special with this article so far. I should make one thing clear here: my pupils were the inmates of a maximum-security prison.
In June 2015 I received a call from GM Roberto Mogranzini asking me if I was available to teach chess at the maximum-security prison of Spoleto (Italy). His offer stunned me, not because the prisoners might be dangerous, but because I feared that I would not be able to meet the expectations of that project. In fact, chess was one of the sports offered to the prisoners in the context of the project “Sport in carcere” (Sport in prison), meant to facilitate their rehabilitation. Thus, my task was to convey some values to those men by means of chess.
