The Strange Case Of Italy’s Bankrupt Casino
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The Casinò di Campione d’Italia went bankrupt in 2018 and was shut down for three years between 2018-2021. The story of the Casi di Casione was recently recounted in a podcast by the Italian author Lorenzo Faggi.
Campione d’Italia's casino was founded in 1917 and is one of the biggest in Europe. It was shut down for bankruptcy on July 27th, 2018, because of high debts. The town's life was dependent on the casino. Out of 600 employees, not a single family in the town of Campione was unaffected.
The Campione casino was built in the second decade of the 1900s. It was supposed to be a spy station during WWI. The casino closed down for a decade after the war. Between the 1905 and the early 2000s, the town of Campion became the "Italian Las Vegas". It hosted up to 4,000 foreigners every weekend.
The author explains the reasons behind the bankruptcy of Italy's casino. The casino had 490 employees, plus 100 civil servants. It was also struggling with the growth of online games and Virtual lottery slot machines. Online and VLT gambling collected 110 billion euros a year in 2019. Casinos could not compete with this. The habit of gambling has changed in Italy. People are trying to find some kind of economic redemption in a society where social mobility has been drastically cut.
The Campione casino was shut down in January 2018. The Supreme Court ruled it was illegitimate and it reopened in June 2021. 174 people were able to work again. It is expected that the casino will be open again on January 26th, 2022. The CEO Marco Ambrosini explains that its future is one of entertainment, more than compulsive gambling.
