A mnemonic rhyme for the Bolognese trumps?

One thing to consider is that the Bolognese did not put numbers on their trumps until the late 18th century. And then, only some, 5 to 16, Amore to Stella. This is how it remains, with no numbers on any cards but those.

Also, no written rules were published until 1753. This means that the Bolognese players learned the order of the trumps at the table, without numbers, for over 300 years. All other versions of the game had numbers on them since at least the beginning of the 16th century, some earlier. Once numbers were on the cards, players didn't have to memorize or recognize the sequence by imagery alone. Numbers bypass the need for a purely iconographic logic to the hierarchy.

Therefore, it makes sense to try to figure out how the Bolognese memorized the sequence during all those 300-plus years. The earliest written rules may give clues, as they are just one slight step away from the purely oral method.

First, the oldest known rules existed in manuscript, and were transcribed in the mid-18th century. The transcriber says the manuscript was “extremely old” (antico), not merely “vecchio” (old). Most commentators are content with “circa 1600” for this manuscript.

These manuscript rules, which the printed rules of 1753 were also based on, begin by describing the deck. They describe the composition of the trumps as two main parts: “Tarocchi” and “Trionfi.”

The Tarocchi are the four trumps which count for five points, the two highest (Angelo and Mondo) and two lowest (Bagattino and Matto). The Trionfi are all the other trumps, with no point values.

Thus the player learned the first and most important group, the four counting cards.

Next he learned that, among the Trionfi, the “quattro papi” are a group, which are not ranked among themselves, but the last played to a trick beats another played to the same trick.

Thus the player learns a second group.

That leaves 14 Trionfi to learn.

The early Bolognese rules abbreviate the names of the Virtues (which are real words, but not the names of the cardinal virtues) -

“Forza” (force, strength) for Fortezza;
“Giusta” (right, correct) for Giustizia;
“Tempra” (temper, tempering) for Temperanza.

This suggests that the names were familiar, spoken for some reason. Why shorten their proper names? I propose the reason for the shortening was to facilitate a mnemonic, as in the following rhyme for the 14 Trionfi:

Sole Luna Stella Saetta,
Diavolo Morte Traditore,
Vecchio Ruota Forza Giusta
Tempra Carro, ed Amore.

This doesn't explain what most interests us about the trump sequence – why did the inventor choose those subjects in particular for the groupings? But examining their use for the purpose for which they were chosen – to be visual signals easily put into a hierarchy – gets us closer to answering that question.

Re: A mnemonic rhyme for the Bolognese trumps?

I fully agree, the Forza Giusta Tempra names would surely have been adopted primarily for mnemonic reasons. And their use helps to explain why the Bolognese left the trumps completely unnumbered for such a very long time (plus the fact that they really only had 14 which posed any challenge to the memory anyway). I like your rhyme, it's a very plausible recreation of a Bolognese mnemonic. Of course, there must have been an earlier version in which Carro was between Ruota and Forza, as we know from the Croce text of 1602. But that doesn't disrupt the scheme of your poem—if anything, it rolls off the tongue even more easily:

Sole Luna Stella Saetta
Diavolo Morte Traditore
Vecchio Ruota Carro Forza
Giusta Tempra ed Amore.

Re: A mnemonic rhyme for the Bolognese trumps?

It seems to me that these mnemonic verses aren't much help in basic play, when you have to play a card in a trick and want either to win or lose the trick. If you're trying to determine whether you have a card that can beat the cards played, you'd have to note where in the stanza they were in relation to your card. And if one of them wasn't there at all, you'd have to remember where the other parts of the sequence were: high, low or papa. It would be better to divide the cards into a manageable number of subsections whose order you remember, for a quick idea of where your card stands, and then have some way of remembering the order within the subsections for fine tuning. That wouldn't be so hard, if they were only two or three cards. At least that's the way I remember the order.

So first come the lows (Fool and Begat), then the papi, then the desires (love and status), the three virtues (things in your power), the hazards of life (fortune, old age, betrayals, and death), then hazards after death (devil and the wrath of God), then the celestials, near the top, then the highs.

In the virtues subset, "tempra, giusta, forza" (or the reverse) has a nice ring. In the next subset you can remember that death is last, then a traitor who is about to die, then an old person who has a little longer to go, and first fortune which can do its thing whenever. God is more powerful than the Devil. The celestials and highs go from least to most light. That's how Piscina presents the sequence (roughly: the C order is harder, and not exactly, because he uses the cosmograph model between Death and the celestials), and it's the most natural, for remembering something long: subsets of meaningful associations strung together by other associations, which I think is also the principle of the "memory theatre". It's a little harder (in Bologna) if the chariot is after the virtues, but not much: fama earned by the virtues is raised or cut down by fortuna. And it's easy to remember that popes, and important people generally, are felled by love, so that love requires tempra.

Where the long verses incorporating the titles of the triumphs have their best use is in remembering one of the most important point-getters of the Bolognese game, the Grande, i.e. a sequence starting with the Angel and including at least two of the next three trionfi. That may be why those four, collectively called the Grande, are unnumbered, to emphasize that the Star isn't one of the critical ones. And why these poems always start with the Angel.

Once you qualify for a Grande, you and your partner keep going down as far as you can, at 5 points a card. To make it easier, the Begat or the Matto can substitute for one you don't have. Those low-lifes are always welcome in this gathering of high-ranking dignitaries, as long as they're kept apart. To remember which card to get next, and to make sure you and don't have any unfilled gaps, a mnemonic would come in handy, like the Strambotto, or, in Bologna, the nasty poem about the Hungarian Protestant who traitorously thought that his people would do better with the Turks than with the Catholics.

In my opinion combinations of this sort, and the others (three or four tarocchi, three or four of each rank of court cards, three or more papi or aces including wild cards) go back to the very beginning of the game, in some form or other (well, perhaps not wild cards). My reasoning is that combinations would have been important in prior games with trumps, notably VIII Imperatori and Marziano's game. In a different form they are also mentioned by Piscina: there, it is apparently just court cards of the same rank that count as combinations, although the odd fact that the Fool can substitute as needed leads me to think that there had been more involvement of triumphs earlier, as is still the case in Bologna.