Pass the card or keep it?

The dialectal name of Stù in use in Montorio al Vomano is probably derived from “Sto” (I’ll stay, or I’ll keep my card), the word used in the dynamics of the game in opposition to “passo” (I’ll pass the card),when you decide to keep your card instead of trying to replace it with your neighbour’s.

In its known variants in the Abruzzo region (in Montorio al Vomano and in Campli, where it is called Cucù or Ttuffë), it is therefore an exchange game and not a trick-taking game , whose deck is composed of forty cards, divided into two sets of numbered cards and picture cards.. The picture cards are organized into two “formations”, either below or above the ten numbered cards, which represent the intermediate values: the five cards below the numbered cards have increasing value and include the Fool that is a negative card, but of a variable value; the last five include  several figures, called “triumphs”, which oblige players to perform actions or pay forfeits.

According to Nicolino Farina, who has carried out a detailed study of the game, Cuckoo was originally played with dice, tiles and other similar objects, identifying a direct antecedent  in a seventeenth century engraving which belongs to a collection of Jesuit manuscripts kept at the Central National Library of Rome. It is a sheet depicting nineteen circles with identical numerical and pictorial representations to those of the Cuckoo game, which were cut out and placed under the pawns. The evolution towards a real deck of cards seems to have occurred in Italy, in the Emilia Romagna area, spreading rapidly throughout Europe from the sixteenth century onwards and reaching its maximum expansion in the eighteenth century.

In the Statutes of Bologna of 1245-1267 there is a mention of a game called Gnaffus, which recalls the name of a card known as Gnaf  in the Stù game from Montorio; the oldest known set of rules of the Cucco game also appeared in Bologna in 1717 although  there were different types of decks of cards in the course of the nineteenth century. Moreover, it is  interesting to hypothesize a similarity between the Cuckoo game and the Trionfi (Triumphs) card games, also known as the Venti figure (Twenty figures), found in Naples, together with the Tarocchi (Tarot) and the Malcontento (Discontent) between 1585 and 1586, when they are listed among the popular games with an ambivalent divinatory function, as suggested by the scholar Giuseppe Ierace.

Farina argues that the game was introduced to  the Teramo area between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, by the Farnese family in Campli and  by Count Carafa, a very influential member of the Neapolitan court, in Montorio,.

Particularly well known in Northern Italy and in Northern Europe, the game was played not only in Bologna, but also in Milan and, more generally, in Lombardy, in Piedmont, towards Venice, perhaps in Rome and in Tuscany, and certainly in Bari where there was a card maker who printed specimens of the game at the beginning of the twentieth century,. There are also significant traces in Spain (Cuco), in Catalonia and in the Balearic islands (Cuc), in France (Coucocu), in Belgium, and in the Netherlands (Koekoek); as a deck of thirty-eight cards in Bavaria and in Austria the Cucco has become the game of the witch (Hexenspiel), or of the bird (Vogelspiel), while in Sweden, in 1741, it is found with an Italian name, Cambio (exchange), later referred to as the Kille; in Denmark it was Gniao or Gnav, and as such it was exported to Norway and finally spread to Finland (Kucku). In some areas of Europe, such as the Danish islands Fionia and Sjælland, or in the Dutch Zeeland, the game is still practiced in a variant with pawns, and it is  increasingly rarely played in Scandinavia and in some of the Bergamo valleys.

The first dealer, chosen by extracting a card, shuffles the deck, gets the player on his left to cut it , gives a card to the first player on his right, and waits for his  decision. If the player decides to keep the card he says “sto” (I’ll stay), while if he thinks he needs to pass it on he says “passo” (I’ll pass it on), and the card is  passed on to the next player, who will then make a decision. When the previous player has chosen to pass the card on, the next one will have to forcefully exchange his card, unless he has a “triumph”, a card with a value greater than or equal to eleven.

The game carrying social and symbolic metaphors is described effectively by Saverio Franchi – who has dedicated a paper to the Stù of Montorio and to the  card game of the Cucù in general – as the representation of human society (the table of players), of social roles and of fate (one’s own card), and of the possibility to change both, either improving or worsening one’s own destiny (by changing the card), but having as a limit the confrontation with the mighty (the “triumphs”, the highest figurative cards) and the risk of falling into misfortune (the lowest figures) or coming across the unpredictable  Fools which it is always better to steer clear of, although in exceptional cases the game may save and reward them (if the two Fools remain, they win).

Moreover, there is always the possibility that the lords of the game are brought down by the crowned owl dominating the darkness and the uncertainties, the highest card: the Cuckoo