CHAPTER 3
Even Odds

After sundown, maskers not in a café or at the theater were likely to be in front of a table throwing dice or playing cards. Nowhere was the social mix greater than in the city’s gambling halls. Here agents of the Inquisitors, expert in penetrating the mask, regularly identified a wide assortment of types: patricians and noble ladies, merchants, Jews, foreign diplomats, vagabonds, prostitutes. Nowhere did the mingling carry more immediate consequences. This was a field where how much you won or lost depended on the sharpness of your wit, how well you judged your opponent, and the whim of fortune, who smiled on all indifferently. Rank held no sway.

Although gambling had gone on in Venice for centuries, its glory days were from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth century. As with many social vices, the city rulers first tried to destroy it by an outright ban. When that failed, they tried to limit its damage by heavy regulation. Unlicensed gambling dens, typically in the backrooms of barbershops, fueled a black-market industry. Then the rulers decided to embrace it.

In 1638, the Council of Ten granted nobles permission to sponsor games of chance in their homes. Marco Dandolo, following the letter but not the spirit of the law, petitioned the Council to allow “private” gambling in his sprawling palazzo near San Moisè. Soon hundreds of players were assembling there. The quarters were dubbed the Ridotto, from the verb ridurre, “to reduce or abridge.” An anonymous poem “In Praise of the New Ridotto” captures something of its atmosphere, which combined burnished opulence, the lure of easy money, and an abundance of masks.

This is where they come to wager
Ducats, sequins, silver, gold.
It has no equal; none can match
Its splendid air or noble mold.

A sculpted goddess in the foyer
Keeps stately vigil night and day.
At the threshold stands a gambler,
With mask in hand and keen to play.¹

Two large chandeliers flanked a central staircase, which led to the main gallery. Upstairs were smaller rooms intended for conversation, dining, and the sale of liqueurs, meats, and jellies. One room was called the “Chamber of Sighs,” where lovers, the weary, and the unlucky went to rest or nurse wounds.² Provided one’s clothes were decent, one could engage even the most refined ladies in conversation at the Ridotto, though all insults or offenses were forbidden, since, as one gambler remarked, “the mask is sacred.”³

In the main room, an eerie silence reigned—“a silence greater than in the church”—as masked men and women sat wordlessly around small tables, their anguish or sudden luck conveyed only by a grimace or twitch.⁴ The banker, by law a noble and the sole figure obliged to keep his face uncovered, sat at a central table piled high with coins and fresh cards. The games were simple. In bassetta, punters staked bets on the likelihood of a given card appearing; in faraone, they wagered on a particular sequence. Skill was relevant, but as much or more depended on luck.

Away from the play in other parts of the building, people milled about in couples or small groups, taking advantage of the mask’s liberty to circulate. Local celebrities were sometimes recognized and hailed. After the triumphal premiere of Carlo Goldoni’s Ladies’ Tales, the playwright’s friends paraded him from room to room. And after the failure of his Old Codger, Goldoni returned there in a mask to hear people condemn the play, an experience he found oddly cleansing. He knew it was bad.⁵

More often, a hush bordering on the funereal prevailed. Contemporaries described what it was like to see scores of maskers moving mutely through the dim candlelight. “The Place is dark and silent, a few glimmering Tapers with a half-Light shew a Set of Beings, stalking along with their pale Faces, which look like so many Death’s Heads poking out through black Pouches; so that one would almost imagine himself in some enchanted Place, or some Region of the Dead.”⁶ The Venetian painter Francesco Guardi conveyed an atmosphere of spectral elegance as maskers trace a circuit that resembles a dance (figure 8).

FIGURE 8. Francesco Guardi, The Ridotto

The Ridotto was also a dangerous place, especially for those who won or lost big. Thieves lurked in the dark streets surrounding the Ridotto, and unpaid debts were sometimes settled by violence. Gamblers could count on finding prostitutes among the masked women, and in the rooms upstairs men sold obscene pictures and illicit verse.⁷ There was also the threat of addiction. Portraits of the compulsive gambler appear in virtually every Venetian memoir of the time. The prodigal spender, ravaged by his obsession, stakes his savings on a last desperate attempt to win it all back. Mozart’s librettist Lorenzo da Ponte, a Venetian by birth, was drawn into the “vicious habit” by a lover who was addicted. They went to the Ridotto almost every night and were soon pawning their clothes and borrowing from gondoliers in the “fallacious hope” of recouping their losses.⁸

The Council of Ten declared that the tables drew a “detestable mix of patricians, foreigners, and plebeians, of honest women and public prostitutes, of cards and weapons by day and by night [that] confound every status, consume every fortune, and corrupt every custom.”⁹ Their greatest concern was not for the meager income of playwrights like da Ponte. It was for the patrimony of ancient families, whose younger members were by no means the only noble players to burn vast sums in a single stretch.

Venetian magistrates worried most about two things at the Ridotto: uncontrolled mingling and profligate waste. Even without masks, games of chance eroded the social differences among players and increased the danger and excitement, especially in stratified societies such as Venice. As Voltaire said, gambling’s rules grant no exceptions, admit no variety, and brook no tyranny. Denis Diderot made the point more directly. “What a wonderful thing gambling is: nothing establishes equality among men more perfectly.”¹⁰ Masks encouraged the recklessness. One critic reasoned that if nobles were to appear barefaced in such establishments, as they did in church, they would set an example of moderation for others.¹¹ The problem was that they preferred to come masked.

There were attempts to reform the Ridotto, often involving masks. In 1703, moved by a mixture of pragmatism and control, the Council of Ten banned masks outright. Any noble in violation would be banished from the Great Council for two years and fined one hundred ducats; commoners in violation would be sentenced to five years in prison. The effect was immediate, although it was not what regulators expected. People stopped coming to the Ridotto. Strong pressure to readmit masks followed, with much of it coming from nobles, and within a year the Council reversed itself. Masks were made mandatory for commoners and optional for nobles, though few nobles came unmasked. The Ridotto sprang back to life.¹²

Gambling destroyed family wealth, eroded self-control, and fueled an unregulated economy in which money passed from hand to hand and class to class. It drew the opprobrium of the Church and the strong censure of civic leaders. It added little to the economy. Some likened it to usury. Others considered it sinful in sanctioning lies. The deceit of card sharks was well known, as was the way the activity insinuated itself into the mind like a narcotic. In short, gambling was neither socially productive nor personally ennobling.¹³ Most nobles knew such arguments and probably rehearsed them to one another.

Yet not all of gambling’s effects were damaging. It also forged a temporary intimacy that was otherwise inconceivable in this city of strict boundaries. For hours at a time, Jews and Catholics, Venetians and foreigners, men and women of every class and occupation huddled together to play by rules that applied equally to all. For Jonathan Walker, who has written an authoritative account of gambling in Venetian noble culture, games of chance structured an etiquette of self-control much as the court and its rituals shaped politesse in France.¹⁴ In both cases, passions were channeled and rough instincts domesticated for the sake of comity. In Venice, it was a glimpse of what relatively free relations not colored by birth might look like.

It is no surprise that the authorities took a dim view of this. By the middle of the eighteenth century, they were convinced that gambling had become a genuine social evil. Agents sent by the Inquisitors furnished a stream of alarming dossiers: about the damage done under the “pretext” of the mask at a regular pool run by Giovanni Canea, where priests, Jews, patricians, Spaniards, and Neapolitans met; about the two nobles, two priests, one Armenian, and five commoners—all named—who met at Dominico Modetto’s casino; about the “gentlemen, priests, friars, Jews, and the largest part of vagabonds, thieves, and riff-raff from here and abroad” who congregated in rooms near St. Mark’s.¹⁵

The authorities could not hope to eliminate gambling in these smaller halls, much less in residences or hideaways. What they could do was make an example of the most visible such establishment, the Ridotto. So in 1744, by an overwhelming margin of 720 to 21, the Great Council voted to close the illustrious hall. A medal was struck to mark the event. On one side were overturned tables in an empty Ridotto. On the other was a lion attacking a crouching gambler whose mask and scattered cards are on the ground.¹⁶ Gambling of course continued in Venice, with more than the twenty-one nobles who had voted against the ban no doubt participating. But this central symbol of vice and improbable school for concord among unequals, where bankruptcy and windfall were available to the small and great alike, would not reopen under the Republic.