About the editor
Who keeps this notebook?
My name is Frances Keogh, and I edit Ridotto Notes from a desk in Melbourne. The site began with a question about words. I grew up inside Australia's unusually domestic betting vocabulary — the pokies, the punt, swy, the TAB — and at some point I noticed that an imported word like 'slots' read as foreign on an Australian page. Why did the language split that way? I opened a notebook to find out, and never quite closed it.
A borrowed word sits wrongly in a familiar room, the way a borrowed chair does. I wanted to know where our room came from — and where it went next.
How I come to the subject
No training stands behind any of this, only years of reading. There is the narrow legal ground two-up still occupies, set out in a statute New South Wales devoted entirely to the game, with Anzac Day printed in the text itself. There are digitised papers running back beyond the first Melbourne Cup in 1861. And there are the etymologies, which keep catching me out — a casino is only a small house, casa with a diminutive on the end, while the swy the diggers threw comes down from cross and pile, played in England and Ireland in the eighteenth century.
Against all that reading I would set one journey. Standing outside the Palazzo Dandolo in Venice, you are looking at the walls that held the Ridotto's supervised tables until 1774, the year Pisani's motion shut them 'to preserve the piety, sound discipline and moderate behavior'. What strikes you is that the palazzo stayed and the institution did not. It surfaced at Monte Carlo in 1863 and, much later, in resort casinos on this side of the world. Tracing that route, stop by stop, is the whole purpose here.
What this site is not
This is a history publication and nothing else: no tips, no odds, no venue guides, nothing to book, and no advertising from anyone who offers those things. What felt worth keeping was the other half of the subject — how a private Venetian sitting room lent its name to an industry, and why Australians still bet in a vocabulary of their own. Where a date is uncertain, the page says so; the reading behind each claim is kept in the margins and listed on the sources page.
Disagree in writing
If I have something wrong — a date, a statute, a word history — I would honestly rather hear it than not. Disagreement in writing is the best post this notebook receives.