Introduction

a) Progress in our knowledge of the game
In my researches on card games, I have devoted some attention also to the game of Cucu.(1) That research is more difficult than average, because at the same time Cucu has the character of a local Italian game, traditionally played in a few places, and that of a game known in various countries, especially of North-Europe.
As for Italy, I could not provide personal experience of actual play, but did care to receive detailed information by experts both of the family game played in the Teramo province and of the trick-taking game played around Bergamo and Brescia.
Recently, a Japanese expert has summarized the situation of the history of the game,(2) bringing to the knowledge of card historians and collectors a contribution by Saverio Franchi, which had appeared among the publications of Italian scholars.(3) She writes that a whole group of writers, active within the IPCS, had previously dealt with the game, and that our contributions were consistent… but unaware of Franchi’s work. Seemingly, the most important suggestion has been that the game could have been played earlier than previously supposed.

b) Cucu and naibi scempi
My past two notes about the Cucu game have been inserted recently in the web pages of trionfi.com,(1) after Lothar Teikemeier had suggested it. It was not my intention to resume this study. However, in the past weeks two opportunities for discussion occurred, which have induced me to study again the relevant questions.
The first occurrence was a short discussion with Lothar Teikemeier himself.(4) He did not accept my foolish hypothesis of “naibi scempi” as the ordinary pack of 48 cards and “naibi doppi” as a pack of 96 cards (thus appearing a long time before the name of minchiate was used for it). He preferred to divide it by two: the single pack could be one of 20-24 cards, with naibi doppi corresponding to the ordinary pack of 40-48 cards. Later on, he even inserted the pack of Cucu into the discussion, considering that one could play reasonable card games even with a reduced pack of about 20 cards.(5) Now, I am already well accustomed to the many theories of his own invention, to the point that I forgot this discussion in a few days.
A second incitement however arrived a few weeks later on: I received a letter from Francesco Allegri,(6) containing a copy of an article by Romualdo Sassi,(7) sent with the view that it could be useful for my present research. The article reports some opinions taking me back to Teikemeier’s suggestion; it is an old article and, as it often occurs with texts by Italian literati, it had not been used by card historians until very recent times. (Conversely, it rarely happens that Italian literati pay a bit of attention to the contributions by card historians.)

c) The limits of this discussion
Cucu is one of the very few games that exists both in the form of a set of game rules and in the form of a special pack. What complicates greatly the situation is that on the one hand variants of the game can be played with an ordinary pack, and on the other hand various games – belonging to remarkably different families – can be played with the special pack. Moreover, a further game set has existed consisting in tokens or pawns with circular images pasted at their bottom.
Here I am not interested in any game of the Cucu family that can be played with the ordinary pack. It is precisely the special pack that I am interested in, and only in its Italian versions. In conclusion, three are the individual questions that are of interest for me here: 1) recent studies on the game, and especially new descriptions of its rules; 2) whether the special pack really could be very old, introduced together with playing cards or even earlier; 3) whether a half of this special pack (namely, without double cards) could be used for some games.

Descriptions of the game rules

The Cucu pack has been used for a long time in Campli and Montorio al Vomano (both within about 20 km from Teramo, in opposite directions) for a game that only had minor differences between the two places. On the rules followed in Campli, I received from the author a jocose description by Marino Di Pancrazio, which I report below in the Appendix.(8) The main rules for playing in Montorio have been summarised by Franchi.(3) More recently, however, no less than two whole books have been devoted to Cucu of Teramo by Nicolino Farina.(9, 10)
It is an unbelievable progress to have about three hundred pages printed on Cucu, and by the same author. This is a work that deserves attention for several aspects. Of course, we find chapters that are not equally interesting for us: in writing a whole book on a game one needs to insert it in the context of other games and it cannot be surprising that we also find chapters devoted to basic historical subjects (better known to us), such as the introduction of playing cards, the development of card production, the appearance of new games, and so on.
On the other hand, the rules of the game played around Bergamo and Brescia are of interest too, also because they prove that trick-taking games - of course, more frequently played with the ordinary pack - can be played with the Cucu pack.
In Italy, some events have recently been dedicated to the Cucu game. Remarkable have been the meetings of 2008 at Carugate (Como): on Saturday 14 June they had a national meeting on Cucu in the morning,(11) and the yearly meeting of the Italian members of the IPCS in the afternoon, both events focused on Cucu.
This was a way for the publisher Nova Charta to celebrate the fact that one of their journals, Il Curioso, had reached its 50th issue. In addition to sponsoring the events mentioned, a special issue of Il Curioso, was also involved, with a 8-page article describing the game and its history.(12)
The authors of that article deal with all the aspects of the game and its history. Among other sources, both the first book by Farina and the mentioned article by Franchi are taken into account. In addition to a summary of the rules of the Teramo game, they also report those collected around the Iseo Lake by Virginio Ferrari, in the Seventies – we have in this case an example of the Brescia-Bergamo trick-taking game.

Cucu as an ancient game

I fear that the contribution by Saverio Franchi has not aided us to reach a correct interpretation of the early spread of Cucu. The author is a scholar, who seriously investigates his field of research. However, I think that the direct link suggested by him with the game of Gnaff mentioned in some statutes of Bologna of the 13th century is misleading, as misleading is on the other hand the extension downwards in time of the habit of playing Cucu with tokens or pawns.
It is certain that Cucu was also played with tokens, having an image pasted on their bases, but this does not at all mean that any game of the ancient civilisations played with pawns or tokens could be of this kind. There are many centuries in the interval requiring further findings, and confirmations.
As reminded by Kimihiko Kuromiya, already Giampaolo Dossena had written that Cucu “è considerato antichissimo, forse anteriore alla introduzione delle carte da gioco in Europa”. (13) I feel that this is a kind of rumour that now and then comes again to the light, recently with the erudite support of Saverio Franchi,(3) which was taken into account by the Italian experts who have written the mentioned articles and books on the game. It is thus essential to search for any old documentary basis.
In the mentioned article by Sassi,(7) I read the following text: «Il Leopardi crede che le carte di quattro colori simulassero una guerra e che le più antiche, dette del cucco, ne avessero due soltanto (spade e bastoni) cui si aggiungessero due colori ausiliari (denari,coppe). Di queste carte posteriori alle minchiate e ai tarocchi, che egli crede di invenzione italiana è verisimile l’origine spagnola, provata dall’uso comune della parola “ombra”, per giocatore, dallo spagnolo “hombre”, uomo.»
The author thinks that the first pack was used for a simulation of a battle and therefore (!) it only had sword and club suits - cups and coins were only added later on, because card games were too simple with only two suits.
These statements derived from a book(14) written by Count Monaldo Leopardi (1776-1847), the father of the renowned poet Giacomo (1798-1837). (Giacomo Leopardi probably was the greatest Italian poet of his time; Monaldo is also well known among Italian literati for his historical studies and his love for bibliography and documents.)
It was thus necessary for me to check the book by Leopardi father, and its sources. The quotation from the book discussed in the article is not fully correct, but more important is what I could verify: in Leopardi’s book there are… no good sources to support his opinions.
There is one further aspect of Leopardi’s theory that I wish to comment on. He writes that the earliest card pack could have been that known with the name of cucco, because it only had two suits. This directly involves the Cucu pack and game of interest here; apparently Leopardi considers that, thanks to its simple structure, this could even antedate “his” sword-club pack. Giampaolo Dossena had probably read some of these suggestions.
Now, the problem is whether Monaldo Leopardi could avail himself of documents that we do not know. This is a possible situation, at least in principle. However, I feel that any historian of nowadays knows much more ancient documents than any expert of the 18th or 19th could know at his time. Indeed, he provides no useful indication of reliable sources; to begin with, his quotation from the classical Tiraboschi work(15) appears rather unsound.
Differently from much other information in his works, these ancient packs apparently are a plain fruit of Leopardi’s imagination. Coming back to Teikemeier’s theory, we just find that another expert had similar ideas in the past, but this is far from a proof, for any theory.

Cucu played with reduced packs

We have seen that the suggestion of Cucu packs used in the middle ages, even in the form of half packs, has no sound basis. However, it may be of interest to ascertain whether any game has been played with Cucu half packs later on. The idea is simple, we just have to find games played with half of the Cucu pack, without any double card.
I have asked about this a lot of experts, both those with a deep knowledge of the individual traditions and those who have a wide knowledge of the general “history and geography” of card games. Indeed, several cases exist, or have existed, in which a Cucu pack was used in a somewhat different form, and I had information on games played with unexpected packs (for instance, a 40-card Cucu pack with four identical cards of the figures and no numeral card).
However, nobody among the experts who answered my question had ever heard, or read, of games played with half a pack, without any double cards.

Conclusions

I have indicated some progress in the description of the Cucu rules, especially as played in the province of Teramo: in particular, two books by Nicolino Farina are now a necessary basis for any further study.(9, 10)
Several recent descriptions of Cucu suggest a possible ancient origin of this special pack, in some cases extending its use even before the introduction of common playing-cards, either in the form of particular tokens, or identifying this special pack with the first playing cards actually used.
I could make no progress in the search of ancient documents on Cucu. The earliest known references deal with a game of the family that was known under a different name, Malcontento or similar, which was played with the ordinary pack. In my opinion, the relation of Cucu with the earlier card game of Malcontento can be considered as certain, but this relation had already been suggested by Thierry Depaulis, more than thirty years ago!(16)
If the special pack of Cucu cards could have existed earlier than the 17th century remains to be proved. In any case, the appearance in Italy of the special Cucu pack was not only later than the introduction of the ordinary cards, it was also certainly later than the wide diffusion of trionfi, which occurred in the middle of the 15th century.

Footnotes:

  (1) Franco Pratesi, The Playing-Card, Vol. XIX No. 2 (1990) 68-76. L’As de Trèfle, N° 54 (1995) 3-5. Franco Pratesi: "Cards and Men for Cucù" (1990) and "Les sources du cucù feuilles volantes et textes polycopiés" (1995)
  (2) Kimihiko Kuromiya, The Playing Card, Vol. 39 No. 4 (2011) 232-233.
  (3) Saverio Franchi, La valle dell’alto Vomano ed i Monti della Laga, Teramo, Carsa, 1991, I, 93-115.
  (4) Lothar Teikemeier, Personal Communication, 27.01.2012.
  (5) Comments at : Franco Pratesi: Naibi with Attributes (2012)
  (6) Francesco Allegri, Letter of 30.03.2012.
  (7) Romualdo Sassi, Atti e memorie della Deputazione di Storia Patria per le Marche, Serie VII, Vol. III (1948) 137-153.
  (8) Marino Di Pancrazio, Regia et Imperiale Regula de lo Dilettevole Joco de lo Cucù. Campli 1962.
  (9) Nicolino Farina, Cucu tra simbologia e storia : antico gioco di carte ancora in uso a Campli e Montorio. Associazione Gandhi, Teramo 1996.
(10) Nicolino Farina, Cucù antico gioco di carte : gnaf, bum e cacaccio nella tradizione di Campli e Montorio. CampliNostraNotizie, Campli 2010.
(11) “Primo convegno nazionale di studi sull’antico gioco del cucù.”
(12) Andrea Angiolino, Sergio Mastromarino, Il Curioso, N. 50 (2008) 36-43.
(13) Giampaolo Dossena, Giochi di carte italiani, Mondadori, Milano 1984, p.55.
(14) Monaldo Leopardi, Annali di Recanati con le leggi e i costumi degli antichi recanatesi. Tipografia Varese, Varese 1945.
(15) Girolamo Tiraboschi, Storia della letteratura italiana. Tomo VI, parte II, Roma 1782, p. 458.
(16) Thierry Depaulis, L’As de Trèfle 11 (1981) 23-24.

Appendix

- Regula by Marino De Pancrazio (1962)

Il DILETTEVOLE GIOCO DEL CUCÚ ovvero “Lu ttuffe”

Regole Principali

Regole secondarie, casi particolari ed eccezionali ed utili ripetizioni