Gambling popes and emperors showcased

(by Daniela Giammusso).
    (ANSA) - Rome, November 15 - 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.