Giorgio Belladonna was an Italian

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

 bridge

Contract bridge

Contract bridge, usually known simply as bridge, is a trick-taking card game using a standard deck of 52 playing cards played by four players in two competing partnerships with partners sitting opposite each other around a small table...

 player, one of the most famous in bridge history. He won 16 World championship titles with the Blue Team

Blue team (bridge)

The Blue Team represented Italy in international contract bridge tournaments, winning sixteen world titles from 1957 through 1975. From 1964 to 1969 and during a 1972 comeback, the team comprised three regular pairs: Walter Avarelli–Giorgio Belladonna, Pietro Forquet–Benito Garozzo, and Massimo...

, playing with Walter Avarelli

Walter Avarelli

Walter Avarelli was an Italian bridge player, a member of the famous Blue Team, with whom he won 9 Bermuda Bowls and 3 World Team Olympiads in the period 1956-1972....

 and Benito Garozzo

Benito Garozzo

Benito Garozzo is one of the most famous bridge players in the history of the game. He has won 13 world championship titles with the Italian Blue Team, playing with Pietro Forquet and later Giorgio Belladonna...

. A leading theoretician, he was the principal inventor of the Roman Club

Roman Club

Roman Club is an artificial bridge bidding system devised in the 1950s by Giorgio Belladonna and Walter Avarelli of Italy's Blue Team. They used it to win twelve WBF World Teams Championships, three Olympiads and numerous European and National titles...

 bidding system

Bidding system

A bidding system in contract bridge is the set of agreements and understandings assigned to calls and sequences of calls used by a partnership, and includes a full description of the meaning of each treatment and convention...

 and, with Benito Garozzo, created Super Precision, a complex strong club based method. He was known as much for his mercurial temperament as for the brilliance of his card play; see, for example, Belladonna coup

Belladonna coup

The Belladonna coup is the play of a low card away from an accompanying high card, giving the opponents the impossible choice between setting up a winner for declarer and abandoning an attack on another suit....

.

External links

• Giorgio Belladonna, 72, Player On Fabled Italian Bridge Team (Obituary), Alan Truscott, New York Times, 1995-05-14
• The All-Time Bridge Greats: Giorgio Belladonna, Bulletin 11 of 18th European Youth Team Championships, 2002-07-17