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Games at the table
Italian social life has a strong tradition of games played sitting down with other people, and they belong to specific occasions. Tombola, a form of bingo played with dried beans on cardboard cards, is a Christmas fixture in most families, with numbers called by their traditional Neapolitan meanings rather than just read out. Card games are regional and taken seriously: briscola and scopa are played everywhere with a forty-card Italian deck whose suits are cups, coins, swords and clubs rather than hearts and spades, and the designs differ by region — Napoletane, Piacentine, Siciliane. Tressette has an elaborate etiquette that includes signaling to your partner with facial gestures, openly and by agreement. The card deck itself explains something: Italy adopted the French suits much later and only for imported games, so a Roman child learns a different set of symbols from a British one. And the simplest game of all remains morra, two players throwing fingers and shouting a number, which is Roman in origin and still played, usually loudly, usually over who pays.