Tarocchino di Bologna — The Real 62-Card Bolognese Deck

At a glance

Bologna's own shrunken tarot: a 62-card pack (the 2s–5s removed) for a fast trick-taking game that has been played continuously for over 500 years — one of the longest-lived card games in Europe. A core witness to the A-order, and the deck the genealogy uses to correct a common error (see below).

Origin & dating

Emerged in Bologna in the late 15th / early 16th century. The 62-card "tarocchino" ("little tarocco") streamlined the pack for play. A celebrated artistic edition is the copper-engraved deck commissioned c.1660 from Giuseppe Maria Mitelli by Count Filippo Bentivoglio. The modern descendant game, Ottocento, still preserves 16th-century features.

Provenance & evidence

Continuous printed editions, a living game tradition with documented rules, and named artistic decks (Mitelli). This is one of the best-attested use histories of any tarot family — we know how it was played, not just how it looked.

Game or divination?

Game — and an especially clear one, because the playing tradition never lapsed. The Bolognese context is overwhelmingly recreational.

The fear question

No fear. A civic pastime. Bologna is also, ironically, where Bernardino preached his 1423 anti-card sermon — yet the city's love of the game outlasted the friar by half a millennium. The pressure was always on gambling stakes, never on the cards as sorcery.

Counter-voices

The key correction the repo draws from Bologna is genealogical, not occult: the Tarot de Marseille is not descended from the Bolognese Tarocchino. They are cousins — Marseille is C-order, Tarocchino is A-order — both children of the common trionfi root. Popular histories that draw a straight Bologna→Marseille line are wrong.

Open questions / corrections owed

• Precise emergence date of the 62-card reduction is fuzzy ("late 15th/early 16th").
• The Bolognese trump order has local quirks (e.g., the four "Moors"/Papi) that the grammar should capture rather than normalise to Marseille.

Sources & further reading

• "Tarocco Bolognese," Wikipedia; "Tarocchini," Grokipedia.
• "Tarocchi Bolognesi: Ottocento," pagat.com (rules); "Il giuoco dilettevole delli tarocchini di Bologna," Princeton Graphic Arts (Mitelli).

RESEARCH NOTE (2026-06-13). Printed Bolognese numbering runs only 5–16; the low and high trumps are unnumbered (so the 0–21 sort order here is positional, not printed numbering). The four equal-rank Papi predate 1725; only the turbaned-Moor imagery is the 1725 change (the Montieri affair / Cardinal Ruffo edict), and two of the four Moors are genuinely identical. The Fibbia origin legend (c.1419) is apocryphal. See research/decks/tarocchino-bologna.md.

Where the pictures come from: who holds this deck's pictures, how sharp they are and what their rights allow: Sources: Tarocchino di Bologna.