Tarot of the Journey to the Orient

The Tarot of the Journey to the Orient, Lo Scarabeo's Marco Polo deck by Riccardo Minetti and Severino Baraldi, declares its honest register upfront, the review preserving it: not strictly historical, but scenes, customs, dress and rituals in the flavour of Polo's tales. That framing is the right disclosure; this is the Orient as Venice imagined it, the merchant-traveler's wonder-book dealt as arcana, and owning the perspective is what keeps the deck a document rather than a costume. Baraldi, the Dragons Tarot's illustrator, paints the caravan world with his historical-adventure fluency, and Minetti's structure maps Polo's journey onto the deck's own. Read it as the catalog reads all travel literature: testimony about the traveler as much as the destination. It suits Polo readers and Silk Road romantics, Baraldi's followers, historians of how Europe pictured Asia, and journey-structure collectors beside the Kings Journey's fictional road. The East's own decks speak for themselves elsewhere; this one honestly speaks for Venice.