Lucca Tarot, 69 cards
Sylvia Mann in "Alle Karten auf den Tisch" "All cards on the table", Marburg 1990, p. 20, points to the Lucca-Tarocchi, which seems to be a reduced Minchiate, using 13 trumps of the normal Minchiate-play with totally 69 cards, that are trumps IX - XV (? Chariot, Wheel, Hermit, Hanging Man, Death, Devil, Tower) + the 5 unnumbered card (called the "aires" in the Minchiate) + the also unnumbered Fool, also having different court figures. The style is similar to the Florentine Minchiate. "So far there is no clue of the game for which this was used".
At p. 40 Sylvia Mann gives further explanations: "The Lucca or Orfeo: For the moment this delightfully mysterious short-lived 17th-18th-century pack remains in a complete vacuum. There is no contemporary reference to it, we do not know what game was played with it, we are not yet certain of it's composition. It exists in fragmentary form mainly in the Museums of the world (e.g. The British Museum, The Fournier Museo, The Cary Collection), always named Minchiate and never complete. There is, in my view, only one complete pack known, and that was at the exhibition in Schaffhausen at Allerheiligen (1st of November) in 1988. There were 69 cards, 56 numeral cards and 13 trumps. .
It must be admitted that at first sight this pattern looks Florentine with its speckled turnover edges and its colouring, mainly red and green. The Trumps are taken from the designs of the Minchiate but nos. I-VIII and XVI-XXXV are omitted , leaving the Fool, Trumps VIIII-XV and the five principal Rossi (= "aires". Star, Mooon. Sun, World + Angelo or Fama ). The courts, however, are different from those of the Minchiate packs. The King are all seated beneath arches. The Cavaliers are normal horses with riders. The Jacks are all male. There are at least three different backs known for the cards: The most usual is a named portrait of "Orfeo"; a soldier inscribed with caption "Alla Fama" (better known as a Florentine mark) and one marked "Lucca". Lucca was a Duchy, sometimes independant, sometimes a province of Tuscany. A shield carried by one of the Jacks bears a half lozenge which might be the badge of the Grimaldis but I can find no connection between that family and Lucca. It is indeed a very curious pack." .
My idea to it , although I myself are sceptical about this idea:
Sylvia Mann calls the Lucca Tarocchi a "short-lived 17th - 18th century deck", however, it is hard to imagine, how she could exclude the possibilty,
that the deck or its composition existed before. Perhaps it is possible to find agreement of the dating of an "unknown origin" at an "undefined time"..
69 cards are nearly 70 cards and 70 cards are the "hidden Trionfi game", that is researched on this site and which was probably the object of early
Trionfi-painters like Iacopo Sagramoro and Bonifacio Bembo. So one suspicion about this deck should be,
that the Lucca Tarocchi is a final reminiscence of earlier times, when card-players prefered decks with a 5x14-structure. The "one missing card"
might refer to an accidently loss - since only one "complete" deck exists, as Sylvia Mann reports ... which makes me wonder, how she has security, that this deck is really complete?