The
knight of clubs
A Neapolitan deck has only 40 cards with no numbers printed on them; there are just suit icons for the numbers, ranging from Ace (1) through 7 plus three face cards. The suits are denari (coins), coppe (cups), spade (swords), and bastoni (clubs). The three face cards in each suit are fante (knave, value of 8), cavallo ( knight, 9) and re (king, 10). To determine the face value of any numeric card, you count the suit icons on the card.
I watched that film again recently and decided to learn how to play Scopa. Yesterday, an 80-year-old cleaning woman, besides cleaning the furniture, absolutely cleaned my clock at the game. Interestingly, she is illiterate. She neither reads nor writes, but ain’t half bad when it comes to numbers. Actually, she’s not too sharp at manipulating numeric symbols such as “6,” but she is The Hawk Woman from Planet X when it comes to recognizing things grouped in sixes or fives or fours, etc. I am apparently not too good at that. (I am not consoled by a recent Japanese study that shows that baby chimps are better at that than adult humans—especially yours truly.)
The two of cups
Scopa is a “trick taking” game. To start,
three cards are dealt to each player with 4 cards face
up between the players as the trick-pile. You then use
cards from your hand to take cards (and points for later
scoring) from the trick-pile. You do this by matching
one of your cards to one in the trick, or to the sum of
two or more cards in the trick-pile, or by “sweeping”
all of the cards in the trick-pile. (Scopa
means “broom” in Italian.) If you do that, you are
entitled to crow “scopa!” and infuriate
the duke sitting across from you. The cards that you
take are moved to your own personal "point pile." When
both players (or all 3 or 4) have depleted their hands,
everyone gets three new cards until the deck is
exhausted at which point the score is totalled. Points
are awarded on the basis of (1) how many cards you
manage to sweep from the face-up cards, (2) how many
times you get “scopa,”(3) whether you
have special cards such as the “seven of coin” (known as
settebello—beautiful seven), and (4) a
bizarrely complicated calculation called the "prime,"
that is, how many 7's you have —but not only. It's much
like "calculate your preadjusted non-deductibles but
subtracting line 8 from line 7 and multiplying that by
the pro-rated post-deductible allowance per paragraph 4,
section 3, unless you are not filing separately." I let
the cleaning lady calculate our points. She wound up
with 12,538 points. I had eleven. There. That’s all I
know, except that you usually play for money.
There are a
number of variations of scopa about which
I know absolutely nothing, except that one of them, lo scopone scientifico, inspired another
film, a 1972 film of that name directed by Luigi
Comencini. It starred Bette Davis, Joseph Cotton, Alberto
Sordi, and Silva Mangano. Davis plays an elderly and
totally unsympathetic American millionairess who journeys
to Rome each year to play this version of scopa
with destitute Peppino (Sordi) and his wife Antonia
(Mangano). She inevitably cleans them out, ruining the
couple's dream of improving their lot in life. I haven’t
seen the film recently, but I recall that their daughter
takes revenge by poisoning the old lady. Hmmmm.