This deck is a reproduction of an ancient Marseille-style deck from before the days when the deck was universal.  Historically, Marseille-style decks differed from town to town, region to region, depending on who the printers were, until the days when the printing press and wide distribution made such practices of local printing obsolete.  The original for this deck came from Milano, according to the title card, around the year 1810.

Gumppenberg was an engraver, not a block printer, so this deck's design has a much finer detail and lovely images as opposed to the crude style of artwork which is generally associated with Marseille-style decks.  This deck is done in the "Soprafino" style, meaning "super-fine" detailing on the card images.  The deck has 22 Major Arcana cards, with traditional titles rendered in fine Italian calligraphy in the box underneath the image which is bordered by a fancy beaded rope detail.  Justice is 8 and Strength 11, in the Marseille-style.  Also, the Death card has no title, merely being numbered 13.  The Fool is unnumbered.  Roman numerals are used, in the subtractive method where IV is 4.  The titles are all in Italian.

The cards in the Minor Arcana use the Marseille traditional suits of Swords, Coins, Cups and Batons.  Again, the titles are all in Italian, however only the court cards are titled.  The numbered cards and the Aces merely show the suit icons, being pip cards and not bearing any scenes to illustrate their meaning.  The court titles are King, Queen, Knight and Page.

The cards themselves are slightly smaller than standard, and are printed on a good, flexible cardstock wih a low gloss protective sheen on them.  The edges are cut evenly and fairly smooth, with rounded corners.  The deck shuffles and handles quite nicely.  The back design is a delicate red flower repeated numerous times against a white background; this is reversible.  There is no little white booklet, rather a series of cards at the end of the deck with the divinatory meanings printed in Italian, German, English, French and Spanish.

I highly recommend this deck for fans of historical decks.  There are other Soprafino type decks on the market from different publishers, but most are limited editions, which run into a lot of money, and hard to find.  This deck is mass produced and it is in a size which makes working with it easy.  A collector might like to have the larger size for the artwork, but would probably want this one as well.  I don't think a beginner would do well with it, but then in general I don't recommend Marseille-style decks for beginners anyway.  Of all the Marseille-style decks, I like the Soprafinos best.

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Review Copyright 2000 by Gina M. Pace

Ancient Tarots of Lombardy, 1995
published by LoScarabeo, Torino, Italy