Creative by passion and by profession, always face to face with art and destiny, the Italian artist Amerigo Folchi painted and drew tarot cards in his home studio in Pistoia, near Florence. He was well known among collectors of tarot cards worldwide; in his unmistakable style he designed 25 decks of them, as well as having conceived and created several related card games including the Gioco del Ceppo, dedicated to the characters of the Della Robbia frieze.

Folchi was self-taught and, after several years as a commercial artist, after the early 1980s created very little apart from his many tarot packs. He started with the local publisher Edizioni del Solleone, and when his 1985 Tarocco della Felicità (Tarot of Happiness) was successful he produced other packs with Solleone, including the 1987 Ommagio a Erté (Homage to Erté). He moved to Italcards in 1988 with the Tarocco del Carnivale di Venezia (Venetian Festival Tarot), then in the 1990s to Edizioni Giakomagico for many of his later tarot projects.