01-028 Tarocco Piemontese

01-028
Tarocco Piemontese

In the previous posts, I have introduced all 5 different suits of standard playing card decks, namely the French-suited, the Spanish-suited, the German-suited, the Italian-suited and the Swiss-suited. Today, we will continue our journey on tarot decks. We will start looking into the three traditional Latin-suited tarot decks that are still used for gaming in Italy. The first of these decks I am going to introduce is the Tarocco Piemontese.

Tarocco Piemontese

As its name suggests, Tarocco Piemontese is the most common tarot playing set in the Piedmontese area of northern Italy. The most popular Piedmontese tarot games are Scarto, Mitigati, Chiamare il Re, and Partita which are played in Pinerolo and Turin. This deck is considered as a part of the Piedmontese culture.

Tarocco Piemontese is in Italian-suit. The deck consists of 5 suits – the swords (spade), the batons (bastoni), the cups (coppe) and the coins (denari), which are similar to those of standard Italian-suited playing cards, and the trumps.

Pip cards of swords, from 1 to 10

Pip cards of batons, from 1 to 10

Pip cards of cups, from 1 to 10

Pip cards of coins, from 1 to 10

All pip cards are numbered but may not have corner pips.

Tarocco Piemontese is the only surviving traditional Latin-suited tarot decks that still consists of 78 cards. The other 2 now only come as stripped decks. Tarocco Piemontese consists of a trump suit of 22 cards, numbered from 0 to 21, and four 14-card suits of swords, batons, cups, and coins. Each suit has a king (re), queen (donna), knight (cavallo) and jack (unlabeled), pip cards numbered from 2 to 10, and an unnumbered card with an elaborate suit symbol which acts as the ace.

Court cards of the four suits.

Jacks are unlabelled.

Trumps and most pip cards have indices in modern Arabic numerals (for trumps, cups, and coins) or Roman numerals (for swords and batons). Unusually, in most games trump 20 outranks trump 21 (this may have been influenced by Bolognese games).

Tarocco Piemontese vs Tarot of Marseilles

The Tarocco Piemontese deck pattern was derived from the Tarot of Marseilles but was made reversible for modern game playing. Tarot of Marseilles is a tarot deck originally designed for playing games. Now, Tarot of Marseilles are sold mainly for divination purpose while Tarocco Piemontese is the closest pattern that people still use it to play games.

Here are the 22 trumps of Tarocco Piemontese deck:

• The World "il mondo" (21)
• The Angel "l'angelo" (20)
• The Sun "il sole" (19)
• The Moon "la luna" (18)
• The Star "le stelle" (17)
• The Tower "la torre" (16)
• The Devil "il diavolo" (15)
• Temperance "la temperenza" (14)
• Death "la morte" (13)
• The Hanged Man "l'appeso" (12)
• Strength "la forza" (11)
• The Wheel of Fortune "rota di fortuna" (10)
• The Hermit "l'eremita" (9)
• Justice "la giustizia" (8)
• The Chariot "il carro" (7)
• The Lovers "gli amanti" (6)
• The Pope "il papa" (5)
• The Emperor "l'imperatore" (4)
• The Empress "l'imperatrice" (3)
• The Popess "la papessa" (2)
• The Pagat "il bagatto" (1)
• The Fool "il matto" (0)

Tarot card readers will find this deck very familiar because of its similarity to Tarot of Marseilles. The 22 trumps are listed as follows and each card bears the same name as the trump suit of Tarot of Marseilles. Therefore, some people do use Tarocco Piemontese for fortune-telling, although the deck is not printed for this intention.

The trump suit, ranked from low to high.

All trump cards are numbered, people who are not familar

with tarot cards would find this deck easy to play with.

Is Tarocco Piemontese worth buying?

Technically, you can play all tarot games with a deck of Tarot Nouveau. Some cards in the Tarocco Piemontese deck lack corner pips. But if you want to play those traditional Italian tarot games, like Scarto, in a more traditional way, you would like to play with a Tarocco Piemontese deck. The cards are beautifully printed and not expensive at all. The patterns are very traditional. Owning a pack of Tarocco Piemontese is like having a piece of Northern Italy history at home. I recommend that.

General Information

Player	3
Playing Time	30 mins
Age	?
Year Released	?
Designer	(Public Domain)
Publisher	Modiano
Family	Trick-taking
Score	?

Specifications

Card size	62mm x 107mm
Deck size	78 cards
# of suits	5 – Swords (spade), Batons (bastoni), Cups (coppe), Coins (denari) & Trumps
Details	The deck is in Italian suit. Pip cards are valued from 2 to 10 and aces are unnumbered. The 4 face cards are King (re), Queen (donna), Knight (cavallo) and Jack (unlabeled). Trump consists of 22 cards, which bear similarity to the trump suit of Tarot of Marseilles. There are no Jokers.

Game Play

Before I can find any video showing the game play of Scarto, please refer to the rules on Gambiter:

https://gambiter.com/cards/Scarto.html

Where to buy?

Etsy.

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