Cartomancy with the Neapolitan deck is an oral folk practice, not a codified system. It has no founding text and no single fixed set of meanings — closer to a recipe passed reader to reader than to a rulebook. The meanings collected here come from a mix of French, Italian and English sources, passed down by amateur card readers; a different reader may hold parts of it differently, and neither is wrong. This page exists because my grandmother was Italian, and my mother read cards.
The deck
The mazzo napoletano — the Neapolitan deck — has 40 cards across four suits: spade (swords), bastoni (batons), coppe (cups), denari (coins). It is, card for card, a 52-card deck with the 8s, 9s and 10s removed: each suit runs ace to seven, then three courts — fante (knave), cavallo (knight), re (king). There is no queen; the donna belongs to tarot decks, not this one.
Spanish-suited cards spread through southern Italy under Spanish rule, and the Neapolitan pattern itself — a recognisable, single-ended design — is attested from the late 18th century.
This site's cards
Italian Fortune shows these meanings on Neapolitan-pattern cards, cut in the woodblock style of the 19th-century Naples packs and coloured the way those packs were: flat colour, a hair off-register. The coins, swords and batons are traced from a 1970 reprint of the old blocks; that source shows no cups, so the cups are drawn for this site, and the colour is added.
The suits
Each suit has a character of its own, taken from the meanings themselves rather than from Tarot symbolism. The middle column is for readers using an ordinary pack — see below.
| Neapolitan | French pack | Character in these readings |
|---|---|---|
| spade — swords | ♠ spades | unity, clarity, authority |
| bastoni — batons | ♣ clubs | the hard suit: separation, betrayal, isolation |
| coppe — cups | ♥ hearts | the benign suit: love, family, friendship |
| denari — coins | ♦ diamonds | material matters: money, work, gains and losses |
The numbers
Meanings here are concrete rather than symbolic — nothing below is Tarot-style numerology.
| № | Italian | French pack | Meaning |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | asso | Ace | the suit's own meaning, at full strength |
| 2 | due | Two | a written message, a letter |
| 3 | tre | Three | love |
| 4 | quattro | Four | bed and intimacy; at its worst, illness |
| 5 | cinque | Five | a phone call, news given aloud |
| 6 | sei | Six | yes |
| 7 | sette | Seven | conversation, and money trouble |
| 8 | fante | Jack | a woman |
| 9 | cavallo | Queen | news on its way |
| 10 | re | King | a man |
The eight is read as a woman even though the fante is drawn as a man. That is a reading convention, not a description of the picture: the meaning is attached to the rank, not the artwork.
Reading with an ordinary pack
You don't need Neapolitan cards to follow these readings. An ordinary 52-card French-suited pack holds the same deck: the suit names are translations of the same older names, and the Neapolitan 40 is that pack with the 8s, 9s and 10s set aside.
- Take the 8s, 9s and 10s out of every suit and put them away. Forty cards remain.
- Ace through seven are the same cards under the same numbers.
- The three courts take the places of the pips you removed, by rank: the Jack is the fante (8), the Queen the cavallo (9), the King the re (10).
- Match the suits with the table above: spades are spade, clubs bastoni, hearts coppe, diamonds denari.
The Neapolitan deck has no queen. Its middle court is the cavallo — the horse, and the rider on it — and a French pack stands the Queen in for it, by rank. Then look each card up in the tables above under whichever name you hold; the meaning is the same.
The ritual
The sources agree on the shape of a reading: shuffle while holding your question in mind, then cut the deck with your left hand — la mano del cuore, the hand of the heart. Italian Fortune shuffles for you and leaves the cut out; a screen can't quite reproduce a gesture. Hold your question in mind before you tap the deck, and the rest of the ritual is yours to keep.
Reading this honestly
Two things are worth holding on to. Variation is normal, not error — two readers can give the same card different weight without either being wrong; what is on this site is a tradition, not the tradition. And Tarot's vocabulary doesn't transfer, even though it is the nearest familiar thing: this deck has no Major Arcana, no numerology of beginnings and endings, and suits whose character has to be read off the actual meanings rather than assumed. Bastoni is not creativity and ambition here — the ace of bastoni means trouble, and every one of its ten entries is unfavourable. Read the table above, not the metaphor.