Tarocco Siciliano

The Tarocco Siciliano is a tarot deck found in Sicily and is used to play Sicilian tarocchi. It is one of the three traditional Latin-suited tarot decks still used for games in Italy, the others being the more prevalent Tarocco Piemontese and the Tarocco Bolognese. The deck was heavily influenced by the Tarocco Bolognese and the Minchiate. It is also the only tarot deck to use the Portuguese variation of the Latin suits of cups, coins, swords, and clubs which died out in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Tarot decks were produced in Palermo before 1630. The deck was shortened from 78 cards during the 18th century. The Tarocco Siciliano currently uses 63 cards, one more than the Tarocco Bolognese. Despite this, the pack is sold with one unneeded card, the 1 of Coins, which was used to bear the stamp tax (the only game that uses this 64th card is the four-handed version played in Barcellona Pozzo di Gotto where it ranks as the lowest in the suit of Coins). The pip cards contains ranks 5 to 10 with the Coins also having a 4. Like modern French tarot, but unlike all other tarot games, the pip cards of all suits rank in progressive order.

Unlike the northern Piemontese and Bolognese tarocchi decks which use Italian suits of smooth batons and curved swords, the Siciliano uses Spanish pips of knobbly cudgels and straight swords like other southern Italian decks. The Siciliano depicts these suits like the extinct Portuguese pattern by the intersecting of the swords and clubs. The Minchiate deck had the same feature.

This deck is known for its distinctly female knaves (donne) that are sometimes referred to as maids. While some decks in southern Italy sometimes include female or androgynous knaves, the Tarocco Siciliano knaves are unambiguously and consistently women. This was a feature found in the Portuguese pattern. Since a Latin tarot deck also includes queens, this is the only traditional playing card deck to include two ranks of women to have survived into the present. The Minchiate deck had half of its knaves female while the Cary-Yale tarot set had three ranks of women per suit.

...
Wikipedia