The Minchiate Fiorentine

Minchiate was Florence's own enlargement of tarot, on record in the city from the sixteenth century under the older name germini, and possibly named as early as 1466. To tarot's line of trumps the Florentines added the missing cardinal virtue, Prudence, then the three theological virtues, the four elements and the twelve signs of the zodiac: forty-one trumps in all, ninety-seven cards in the pack. The papacy is conspicuously absent. The five lowest trumps, nicknamed the papi, the popes, run from a seated conjurer through the Grand Duke and two Emperors up to Love, and no Pope or Popess appears anywhere. Trumps one to thirty-five carry Roman numerals, counted the old additive way, XVIIII for nineteen; the top five, the arie, carry no numbers at all, and a player was simply expected to know the Star, Moon, Sun, World and Trumpets in order.

The game itself was a partnership trick-taker with a long memory. Captured cards counted points, sequences called verzicole scored extra, and the whole thing was famous for taking an evening and a good head to play. It spread from Tuscany to Rome, Genoa, Sicily and into France, and faded out in the decades around 1900, lasting longest in the city that invented it.

This pack is one of the last of the line: woodcut cards colored through stencils, about ten centimeters tall, issued in Florence by the house of A. Baragioli between 1860 and 1890, still printing the pattern the city had settled on two centuries earlier. The oval Tuscan duty stamp is inked on the Libra trump, proof the tax office came before the shuffling. The complete deck of ninety-seven passed through the playing card collection of Henry-René d'Allemagne into the Bibliothèque nationale de France, whose scans these are.