Tarocco Siciliano — the Sicilian Tarot

At a glance

The tarot pack of Sicily, still used for the game of Sicilian tarocchi. It has 63 cards: twenty numbered trumps, the Miseria below them, the Fool (the Fugitive), and four suits in which only the cards from 5 to 10 and the four courts remain, with a 4 kept in coins. A 64th card, the ace of coins, was added in the 19th century to carry the tax stamp.

Where it comes from

Tarot reached Sicily in the mid-17th century, probably from Rome, as the 97-card Gallerini (the Minchiate) and a 78-card tarocchi; by the 1780s the pack was being shortened, and the 63-card pack became the standard. Several trumps borrow their pictures from the Minchiate.

What is its own

• Trumps found nowhere else: Miseria, a chained beggar below trump 1; Constancy (4) with her flag; the Ship (14); Atlas with the globe (19); Jupiter as the highest trump (20). There is no Devil.
• Names lost: players call trumps 2 to 15 by number; only the old names of 4, 14 and 15 are known .
• Women knaves: the lowest court in each suit is a maid, so the pack has two ranks of women .
• Portuguese suits: knobbly clubs and straight swords that cross, the last tarot with this form of the Latin suits .

In this library

The 21 trumps (twenty numbered, and the Miseria) and the Fool, with pictures where an open one exists. The 41 suit cards are still to be added.

Where the pictures come from

Five trumps (Miseria, Constancy, Ship, Moon, Jupiter) are scans of a 1966 Modiano pack, filed on Wikimedia Commons as public domain (PD-old-70); the pattern itself settled in the early 19th century. A printed pack from 1966 is a weak case for public domain, so these are listed among the flagged images. The Fool and the cover are photographs by Wikimedia users under CC BY-SA 4.0 (Riccardo ricceri; Countakeshi). The other trumps have no open picture yet.