The Tarocchino of Bologna and Its Shortened Deck

Why would a city invent a tarot deck by removing cards rather than adding them? Bologna is the answer. Where Florence swelled its pack to ninety-seven cards, discussed through The Minchiate of Florence: A Tarot with Ninety-Seven Cards, the tarocchino bolognese deck went the other way: sixty-two cards, built by stripping the lowest numeral cards from each suit and keeping the rest. Two neighbouring cities, two opposite instincts, both working from the same basic game.

Cutting the pack down for the tarocchino bolognese deck

Standard Italian-suited tarot runs to seventy-eight cards: four suits of fourteen (ten numerals plus four court cards), and twenty-two trumps with the Fool. Bolognese card makers removed the two, three, four and five of each suit, trimming the numeral run in every suit down to six cards: the ace and the six through ten. That drops the minor arcana from fifty-six cards to forty, which, added to the twenty-two trumps, gives the tarocchino its sixty-two. The name itself, a diminutive of tarocchi, signals the trimming directly: a "little tarot," smaller by design, not by accident or loss over time.

A legendary inventor

Bolognese tradition credits the deck's invention to Francesco Fibbia, a Pisan prince said to have settled in Bologna and devised the shortened pattern there in the early fifteenth century. Local lore even places a plaque and a tomb inscription honouring him as the game's father. Tradition holds this account more firmly than the documentary record does: historians treat Fibbia's authorship as civic legend rather than settled fact, the kind of founding story a card-playing city likes to tell about itself. What the record does support is Bologna's long, continuous attachment to its particular sixty-two card pattern, maintained locally for centuries after other regions had moved on to different variants.

The Four Moors and a court dispute

One detail sets tarocchino apart from almost every other regional pack: the lowest four trumps, originally figures of civic and religious authority, were at some point replaced in Bolognese decks by four so-called Moors, crowned figures holding ceremonial maces. The change is usually explained as a response to Church sensitivity about representing the Pope and Emperor as the lowest-ranking trumps, outranked by ordinary virtue cards; swapping in generic royal figures sidestepped the complaint without disturbing the deck's overall structure. Whatever the precise trigger, the substitution shows the same pattern seen across regional tarot history: local authorities and local tastes reshaping a shared game template, card by card, city by city.

The tarocchino bolognese deck in play

Learning the tarocchino bolognese deck today means learning a trick-taking game with its own point values, not a symbolic reading. Each trump outranks every numeral and court card beneath it, and specific cards, the highest trumps and certain honours, carry bonus points collected at the end of a hand. Partnerships of two or four players bid, declare and play rounds much as in bridge or other trick-taking games, with the shortened numeral run making each hand move faster than a full seventy-eight card deck would allow. That practical speed may be part of why the pattern survived locally for so long: a smaller pack suits a quick evening game better than a sprawling one.

Still played today

Tarocchino bolognese has not vanished into museum collections the way minchiate largely has. Variants of the game are still played competitively in and around Bologna, with rules passed through card clubs and regional associations rather than printed rulebooks alone. That continuity gives the deck a useful status for anyone studying tarot history: it is a living demonstration of how the fifteenth-century trionfi game actually worked as entertainment, trick-taking and point-scoring, centuries before any of its imagery was read as a path on the Tree of Life or treated as a counterpart to The Hermit and the other trumps in a divinatory spread.

What the shortened deck teaches

The tarocchino's missing numerals matter for the same reason minchiate's extra trumps do: they prove that a regional card-making tradition could prune or expand the shared tarot template freely, driven by local printing costs, guild habits, or a city's taste for a particular kind of game, without any of it touching the question of meaning. Bologna cut cards to streamline play. Florence added them to enrich it. Neither city was building a symbolic system for a reader to interpret; both were refining a card game for people who intended to shuffle, deal and score, not divine. Readers interested in the deck's documented structure can consult the overview of Tarocchino Bolognese for the modern rules still used in play today.

A reminder before the esoteric turn

Placed beside Florence's ninety-seven cards and the plain Marseille pattern cut by Nicolas Conver, Bologna's sixty-two card tarocchino completes a picture worth holding onto before this series turns to the moment the cards stopped being treated as a game at all. Regional variation was the rule, not the exception, across Italy and France alike. The fixed, symbol-laden deck familiar to Thoth readers today is a much later invention, grafted onto a patchwork of local games that had already been changing shape, by subtraction and addition, for three centuries.