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Cover Illustration: Pietro Longhi, The Ridotto of Venice, ca. 1750. Oil on canvas, 55 × 72 cm. Photo by De Agostini/Getty Images. The Ridotto, a wing of Venice’s Palazzo Dandolo at San Moisè, was established in 1638 as a government-owned gambling house. Noblemen, the only attendees who could normally afford to make wagers, were obliged to wear three-cornered hats and masks. Women of various social ranks also came in disguise. The Ridotto was a place where the elite engaged in amorous flirtations and pursued their desires. In Longhi’s rendition, a gentleman is gently lifting a gentlewoman’s dress. A less elaborately dressed woman generously exposes her bosom for male admirers. Gambling houses, an important part of Venice’s new entertainment attractions during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, facilitated the expansion of the commodification of sex, offering traveling adventurers and sex workers alike the anonymity that state-regulated brothels could not provide. In “Making a Living: The Sex Trade in Early Modern Venice,” Joanne M. Ferraro moves the gendered analysis of sex work in an economic direction by focusing on the ground-up economics that provided women as well as men with disposable income, economic value, and agency.