Ancient Minchiate Etruria, 1725

Rating:
Summary: A beutiful, useful, and interesting deck.
Review: The Minchiate deck is a variant of the better known tarot deck, and differs in the major arcana - there are 41 cards, rather than 22, so there are 97 cards in the deck.

The extra major arcana cards include the 12 signs of the zodiac, the 4 elements, and the 4 extra virtues. Due to religious / political reasons, the pope, popess, emperor, and empress are replaced by the grand duke, eastern & western emperors.

I find the 18th century art very beutiful, and regretfuly cant give a URL to a site that carries a sample of scanned cards.

The deck comes with a small divination booklet, and nothing much beyond that. The only book I'm aware of that goes in details to the Minchiate deck is the one that comes with Brian Williams' Minchiate deck (which I highly recommend).

I read mostly with the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, with this being my next most used deck. I highly recommend it to tarot readers and collectors.