Every chess piece has a usual way of coming out. Knights hop toward the centre. Bishops step out onto the long open diagonals. But there's one development that goes sideways first — and it has an Italian name worth keeping.
A fianchetto is when you move a bishop to the second rank of the adjacent file and park it on the long diagonal: g2 or b2 for White, g7 or b7 for Black. To get it there you push the knight's pawn forward a single square — g3 before Bg2, b6 before Bb7 — and slip the bishop to the empty square behind it. The word is Italian for "little flank," a perfect little name for a little flanking move.
Why bother?
Developed this way, the bishop doesn't attack the centre head-on. It watches it from a distance, on a diagonal that runs the whole length of the board. From b2 or g2 it pressures the middle squares — the pawns you'd rather not push early — and stands ready to support a later e4 thrust when the time is right. You trade a little space for a lot of patience and pressure.
This sideways patience is the signature of the hypermodern school, the early-20th-century idea that you needn't occupy the centre at all. Let your opponent fill it with pawns, the hypermoderns argued; then chip away at that structure from the flanks and take it apart. It also shows up constantly in the Indian defences, those openings named for the way Black fianchettoes the king's bishop behind its pawn chain.
A word with a history
The fianchetto isn't modern. Games opening with 1.g3 appeared in the Chess Player's Chronicle as early as 1841–42 — the move was played before the word for it was widely known. The term arrived in English through Italian usage: an early definition in the October 1858 Chess Monthly described the fianchetto as the opening starting 1.e4 b6, deriving it from fianco, "flank," with the diminutive ending etto. The Italians themselves kept the flank separate, speaking of "Il Fianchetto di Donna" and "Fianchetto di Re" — names for the queen's-side and king's-side versions commonly dated to the 19th century.
Four bishops, all of them small
The pattern reached a kind of absurdist peak in Rubinstein–Nimzowitsch, Marienbad 1925, where both masters fianchettoed all four bishops. Nimzowitsch, who delighted in such curiosities, later wrote in My System:
"Each side castles now with a clear conscience, for not even the most hypermodern pair of masters can produce more than four fianchettoed Bishops!"
There's a limit to how much flanking even the boldest imagination can manage — and that's exactly the joke, and the charm.
Start with one. Push the knight's pawn, slip the bishop onto the long diagonal, and let it do its quiet, patient work. The little flank goes a long way.
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