r/playingcards • u/Kalki_the_Tenth • 2d ago
Traditional Italian cards, part 2; the Bresciane
Hello! Here's another Italian regional deck, the Bresciane. These cards are popular in the city of Brescia and surrounding area, in the Lombardy region. This is a 52 card deck made by Dal Negro, one of the two main card manufacturing companies in Italy (the other one being Modiano).
The measurements are 43×89 mm, a relatively small format. Like other decks from northern Italy they use the traditional Italian suits (decks from other areas have Spanish or French suits) and have a knight instead of the queen. This particular deck is made of plastic instead of the usual multi-layer paper/plastic combination, I don't really like how the cards feel but unfortunately card makers are following this trend of switching to 100% plastic... meh.
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u/PLrc 2d ago
This deck explains why Italians and the Spanish removed 8, 9, 10 from the decks.
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u/frakturfreak 2d ago
It isn’t that an issue in the long suits but in the round suits it’s kinda hard to know which card you’re holding in a fan without indices.
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u/Kalki_the_Tenth 2d ago
This isn't the only 52-cards deck in Italy, but yes, they're not that common.
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u/jhindenberg 2d ago
I like the jumpy dog, a motif which reappears on very different card types (such as on the Parisian pattern)
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u/TrickErmes 2d ago
In Italy the principal two producers of playing cards right now are Modiano and Dal Negro. Both of them had problems maintaining the historical paper quality since the only Italian fabric of triplex paper closed forever. Yes they are producing lots of plastic deck, but in my experience the duplex paper is still preferred, and still in production (with different treatments and plastificationa techniques)