Sexual regulations and prohibitions were a central mechanism of colonial rule, and there is a growing amount of literature addressing a variety of topics related to sexuality, intimacy, and empire. The question of prostitution has been widely debated in the study of empire. Heather J. Sharkey argued that the regulation of prostitution in Sudan was part of a larger attempt to control the movement of labor after the British abolished the slave trade in 1899. In terms of the French empire, Christelle Taraud published a landmark study on prostitution in North Africa, one of the first to move away from the colonial paradigm of exploited female sexuality. Taraud argued that prostitution was much less socially marginalized under the Ottomans but that the French administration organized a coercive system aimed at controlling, regulating, concentrating, imprisoning, and capitalizing prostitution in North Africa as soon as the French entered Algeria in 1830. However, these works have not adequately addressed many of the continuities between the colonial and pre-colonial periods in terms of policies.   My paper addresses the shared practices and attitudes about sexuality and prostitution between the modernizing Ottoman and Italian governments during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Specifically, I will be looking at Ottoman and Italian laws and medical texts related to the regulation of brothels in the city of Tripoli, in order to show how these governments organized and policed divisions between different ethnic and religious communities. This paper argues that both the Italian and Ottoman governments both saw controlling access to specific categories of women as central to a well-ordered city. The Ottoman authorities sought to prevent Muslim women from forming liaisons, temporary or otherwise, with non-Muslim men while the Italian authorities would increasingly regulate intimate interactions to try to prevent interactions between Muslim men and European women. Starting in the 1930s, there was a larger attempt to regularize the colony, which went hand-in-hand with stricter divisions between the local population and Europeans. However, European men continued to have sexual access to Muslim women. In conclusion, this project, by closely examining spaces of intimacy, sheds new light on the shared assumptions about sex and gender which spanned the Mediterranean.