The game of Cucco is known in Campli as Cucù or Ttuffë, after the names of the highest-ranking cards and the symbolic meanings they embody. The highest-value card (XV), the Cucù or Cucco — a cuckoo often depicted as an owl, a little owl or even a parrot — takes its name from the onomatopoeic sound of the bird’s call (cu-cu, cucù). It forbids exchange and generally does not require the payment of any penalty, although exceptions may exist in certain rule sets. The next highest card after the Cucù, known as Ttuffë, Bum or Hai pigliato Bragon (XIV), was represented in the old Campli deck by a soldier holding a muzzle-loading pistol in the act of firing, its name deriving from the onomatopoeic sound of the shot (tuff). This card also forbids exchange and forces any player seeking a better outcome to pay a penalty.

In its variants known in Abruzzo, it is therefore a game of exchange rather than of trick-taking (in Campli and Montorio al Vomano, where it is instead called Stù). The deck consists of forty cards, divided into numbered and court cards, each repeated twice. The figures are arranged in two “ranks”, below and above the ten numbered cards, which represent the intermediate values: the first five have increasing minimum value, including the Matto, a negative card with a variable value; the last five are composed of various figures known as “trionfi”, which impose actions or penalties on the players who encounter them.

According to Nicolino Farina, who has devoted a detailed study to the game, Cucù was originally played with dice, counters and similar objects. He identifies a direct antecedent in a seventeenth-century engraving from a collection of Jesuit manuscripts preserved at the National Central Library of Rome. The sheet depicts nineteen roundels bearing the same numerical and figurative representations as the Cucù, which were cut out and placed beneath the pieces. The transition to an actual deck of cards likely took place in Italy, in the Emilia region, before spreading rapidly throughout Europe from the sixteenth century and reaching its peak in the eighteenth century.

The Statutes of Bologna (1245–1267) mention a game called Gnaffus, whose name recalls the present-day Gnaf card of the Stù played in Montorio. In Bologna, moreover, the oldest known rules of the Cucco game appear as early as 1717, and various types of card decks are attested throughout the nineteenth century. It is also intriguing to suggest a similarity between Cucù and the Trionfi games, known as the “Venti figure”, documented in Naples alongside Tarocchi and Malcontento between 1585 and 1586, when they were counted among popular games with an ambivalent divinatory function, as noted by the scholar Giuseppe Ierace.

Farina suggests that the game was introduced into the Teramo area between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: in Campli by the Farnese family and in Montorio by the Counts Carafa, a family highly influential at the Neapolitan court. Particularly well known in northern Italy and across northern Europe, the game was played not only in Bologna but also in Milan and, more broadly, in Lombardy and Piedmont, as well as towards Venice, and possibly in Rome and Tuscany. In Bari, at the beginning of the twentieth century, a card maker was known to have been producing Cucù decks.

Significant traces of the game can also be found in Spain (Cuco), in Catalonia and the Balearic Islands (Cuc), in France (Coucou), in Belgium and in the Netherlands (Koekoek). As a thirty-eight-card deck, the Cucco became in Bavaria and Austria the “witch game” (Hexenspiel) or the “bird game” (Vogelspiel). In Sweden, in 1741, it appears under an Italian name, Cambio (“exchange”), later known as Kille; in Denmark, it was called Gniao or Gnav, and from there it spread to Norway and eventually to Finland (Kucku).

In some areas of Europe, such as the Danish islands of Funen and Zealand, or in the Dutch region of Zeeland, the game is still played today in a variant using counters, and, although increasingly rare, it remains in use in parts of Scandinavia and in some valleys of the Bergamo area.The first dealer, chosen by drawing a card, shuffles the deck, has it cut by the player to their left, and deals a card anticlockwise to the first player on their right, waiting for their decision. If the player chooses to keep the card, they say “sto”; if they wish to pass it, they say “passo”, and the card is then dealt to the next player, who in turn must make a decision. When the previous player has chosen to pass, the next player is required to exchange their card, unless they hold a “trionfo”, that is, a card with a value equal to or higher than eleven.

A game rich in social and symbolic metaphors, it is effectively described by Saverio Franchi — who devoted a study to the Stù of Montorio and to the broader Cucù game — as a representation of human society (the table of players), of social roles and destinies (one’s own card), and of the possibility of changing both by improving or worsening one’s fate (the exchange of cards). This, however, is limited by confrontation with the powerful (the “trionfi”, the highest-ranking court cards) and by the risk of falling into misfortune (the lower figures) or into the unpredictable (the Matti), which are best avoided but may, in exceptional cases, even save and reward (two Matti that remain win), or have the power to drag others down and cause even the master of the game — the crowned owl who rules over darkness and uncertainty, the highest card, the Cucù — to “lose a life”.