Benito Jacovitti's anticommunist playing cards - and their communist counterpart
Sometimes politics is not done in Parliament, but on the gaming table
This... is Crazy Ass Moments in Italian Politics, the political newsletter your party leader doesn't want you to read!
On our Twitter page, we have often discussed the topic of election gadgets, one of the many things now less and less present in the age of social networking. When things were different, and you really had to convince people house by house and neighbourhood by neighbourhood, parties came up with wonderful things.
Today at best there are horrendous rebuses, like the one from Fratelli d'Italia, or the dog crap bag collector signed by Carlo Calenda. Yikes.
Without further ado, let us present two nice gadgets from the past: the anti-communist playing cards, drawn in 1951 by none other than the famous cartoonist Benito Jacovitti, and - from a few years later - the pro-communist playing cards, probably produced as an 'answer' to Jacovitti’s deck.
If you like playing cards, then you will go crazy seeing these things!
Both examples, which are very rare, come from the private collection of Gustavo Orlando Zon, president of the playing card collectors' association 7Bello Cartagiocofilia Italiana, whom we thank. You can visit their website by clicking the link.
Benito Jacovitti’s anti-communist cards
A rare and extraordinary humorous game created by Benito Jacovitti in view of the 1951 political elections; the theme is explicitly anti-communist.
Published by an unidentified "Civic Committee" (the Civic Committees were an organisation aimed at the political mobilisation of Catholics, founded by Luigi Gedda at the behest of Pope Pius XII in an anti-communist function) and printed by a company in Spoleto, it consists of forty cards, each one different from the other, with whole figures and modified Piacenza suits.
Signature 'Jac 51' to the three of swords.
The denarii become rubles. On the ace of swords appears Stalin, also present on other cards; at the three of roubles there is Pietro Nenni, and at the ace of roubles, again Stalin with Togliatti. Blue back with mottos in favour of the vote by the Civic Committee.
Dimensions: mm 72 x 114. Without box (it was distributed wrapped in a light paper wrapper).
Communist playing cards (unknown artist)
Produced in 1956 by a Roman printer for the Italian Communist Party, whose symbol is on the back.
Printed on very thin cardboard destined for destruction.
Traditional Italian suits are heavily modified, and sometimes transformed: swords are forks, clubs wear the fascist fez, denarii become dollars, and cups, in some cards, are Christian Democrat cups or shields.
Without box (perhaps never existed). Dimensions: mm 45x65. Given its rarity and the ease with which the cards were worn, the exemplar is incomplete.
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