Italy dominates June 2026 women’s steel sword and buckler rankings

Alessandra Ghedini sat alone at the top of the June 2026 women’s steel sword and buckler rankings with a weighted rating of 1726.5, and the names chasing her told the larger story. Nicole Lombardi, Arianna Scarselli, Eleonora Manoni, Martina Bombardi, Natalia Balybina, Irene Caldi and Aleksandra Wacławik filled the next places, giving the table an international sheen while still leaving Italy in control of the category’s center of gravity.

That is what made this rankings snapshot more revealing than a simple leaderboard. HEMA Ratings said it collects results from as many tournaments as possible and turns them into ratings, and the June women’s steel sword and buckler page showed 107 entries, a healthy number for a specialized weapon division. In a field that size, the opening cluster matters: multiple members of Sala d'Arme Achille Marozzo and other Italian clubs were packed near the top, suggesting that Italy’s lead is not just about one star but about a broader domestic pipeline that keeps producing high-rated results.

The rest of the top 20 reinforced that picture. Erica Castiglioni, Giada Rinaldini, Diana Michelis, Ludovica Lanzieri, Martina Stazi and Cecilia Buffatti joined the front end of the table, while Nordic and Central European names such as Torun Sandström Wadell, Carolin Nilsson Wahlgren and Maria Ruthgård gave the rankings a wider continental footprint. The table was international in composition, but the competitive weight still leaned toward Italian programs, especially in the first half of the standings where the rating points accumulate fastest and the hierarchy becomes hardest to break.

That imbalance makes sense in a weapon with a deep historical lineage. The anonymous Royal Armouries manuscript I.33 is commonly cited as the oldest known sword-and-buckler source, while Achille Marozzo’s Opera Nova, published in 1536, treated sword and buckler as a foundational weapon for war and self-defense. Sala d'Arme Achille Marozzo says Book 1 of Marozzo’s treatise is devoted to sword and buckler, a direct link between the modern Italian scene and the sources it studies.

Ghedini’s standing also fit a recent competitive precedent: a June 15, 2023 profile in Quotidiano Sportivo described her as the women’s spada sola champion in the CSEN historical fencing circuit and identified her as an athlete of Hema Ravenna. With that kind of established record at the top and a dense Italian chase group beneath her, the June table looked less like a surprise and more like a structure that will take more than one result to dislodge.