In 1638 the city of Venice did something no city had done before. Rather than keep chasing the card games that flourished in private palazzi every Carnival season, it opened a room of its own, in a wing of the Palazzo Dandolo near San Moisè, and invited the public in. The room was called the Ridotto. It had rules, fixed hours, and a share of every table for the house. Every casino built since, from a principality on the Mediterranean to a lobby on a phone, is a footnote to that decision. A room in Venice, 1638 The spa town and the principality The desert and the neon 1994, two beginnings in one year What survived every move The rule the Ridotto knew A room in Venice, 1638 Two details of the Ridotto explain a great deal about what followed. The first is that it opened for Carnival, the weeks of masked revelry before Lent, and its players came in masks. Venetian masks were never only decoration; as Stuff’s photographs of a masked but empty Carnival showed in 2021, they were an accessory for games and parties, a…