The present harmless appearance of the Tower is also to be explained as an alteration made by the duchess Rosalia Caccamo. In a bit of the opuscolo which is now damaged and very hard to read, Villabianca says that in his youth trump 15 showed “il novissimo dell’... ”; the last word is illegible, and I am unsure what it could be. Villiabianca further says that the duchess had its subject changed into the Tower. Traditionally, trump 15 was sometimes known as “the House of the Devil” or “the House of the Damned”, and occasionally outright as “Hell”; Minchiate trump 15 shows a devil emerging to drag a woman down to hell. I suppose that it was something of this sort that the duchess replaced by the Tower as we now have it. Villabianca states that she paid the expense for the change of subject in trumps 14 and 15; I suppose that she paid cardmakers to make new wood blocks incorporating the new designs.
Michael Dummett, "The Sicilian Trumps", The Playing-card, Jan-Mar 2005.)
“I quattro novissimi” (literally, the four new things) are Death (la Morte), Judgment (il Giudizio), Hell (l'Inferno) and Heaven (il Cielo or il Paradiso). So the sentence that Dummett could not read must have been “il novissimo dell'inferno” (the only one that, beginning with a vowel, can be preceded by dell'). In English, these concepts are known as “the four last things”, in Greek as ἔσχατα,éschata, hence the word “eschatology”.
On google books it is possible to find a few books discussing the subject. I attach the images that open the four chapters of “Prediche sopra I quattro Novissimi” (Sermons about the four Last Things) by Gabriele Inchino, third edition, 1601. Note the Stars, Moon and Sun in the Judgment illustration: the subtitle reads "Erunt signa in Sole et Luna et Stellis" (There will be signs in the sun, moon and stars), Luke, 21.
Two of the four (Death and Judgment) are unambiguously represented in Tarot. As noted by Dummett, "the Tower" has been occasionally interpreted as Hell. In early cards, the World sometimes presents an iconography that is close to that of Christian Heaven as described in the Book of Revelation: the New Jerusalem, the New Earth, Christ with the Tetramorph (the symbols of the Evangelists).
