(by Daniela Giammusso).
Fondazione Benetton Studi
Ricerche is celebrating its 30th anniversary by holding a show
focusing on gambling throughout the centuries.
The show will be held in the Bomben exhibition halls of
Treviso from November 17 until January 14.
Legend has it that dice were invented by Palamedes during the
Trojan War. But even before there were games with their
ancestor: a four-sided goat astragalus.
And even before that there was the Egyptian 'Senet', from the
fourth century BC onwards. Passages in the Old Testament in
which God tells Joseph to draw lots to divide up the Promised
Land tie into the history of games of chance as well.
The history of man can be seen through the lens of his
passion for playing and risk is the idea behind the exhibition
'Lotteries, lotto, slot machines. The luck of the draw: the
history of games of chance'.
There are over 120 exhibition pieces including manuscripts,
etchings, hoardings and important loans, such as the ancient
Belgian National Lottery games of Brussels, curated by the
historian Gherardo Ortalli, head of the research studies section
of Fondazione Benetton.
"Playing," he noted, "is an innate and fundamental part of
living beginning in early infancy. Gambling for money should be
studied due to its social implications. The current importance
of compulsive gambling is proof that problems with very serious
consequences can arise."
The problem is by no means new, given that "Emperor Augustus
sometimes lost as much as 20,000 sestertius in a single day,"
the exhibition curator noted.
Nero was the same, while Emperor Claudius wrote a treatise
on dice and arranged his vehicle so that bumps in the road would
not disturb the game.
After a crisis in the ancient world, gambling lost its
popularity until the 13th century, when European states
rediscovered its financial advantages.
The exhibition also shows the importance of the arrival onto
the scene from the Orient of card games in the late fourth
century AD, followed in the fifth century by an explosion of
lotteries in which the state intervened heavily, setting aside a
share of the earnings to various undertakings: from wars to
hospices to the reclamation of the Pontine Marshes and even the
construction of the Trevi Fountain.
The exhibition includes the official notice with which
Clementine XII in 1731 authorized the state lottery, only three
years after the excommunication of gamblers by his predecessor,
Benedict XIII as well as the decree with which the 'dictator of
The Two Sicilies banned it and that shortly thereafter with
which the Italy born of the Reunification reintroduced it.
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