Campione d'Italia is a small Italian exclave on the eastern shore of Lake Lugano, entirely surrounded by Swiss territory. Since 1917 its public life has been tied to one building: the Casino di Campione d'Italia, which has been closed, reopened and rebuilt several times over more than a hundred years.
The first casino, 1917 to 1933
The original Casino Municipale opened in 1917, during the First World War, when Campione's unusual status as Italian ground inside Switzerland made it a useful, neutral meeting point. It operated for only two years before closing on 19 July 1919. The casino did not reopen until 2 March 1933, under an Italian government decree. From then on it ran for decades under state ownership, operated by the municipality, and its gaming revenue became the financial basis of the town: Campione d'Italia has never levied local taxes on its residents, relying instead on income from the casino.
The Mario Botta building
The early twentieth-century casino was eventually replaced entirely. On 9 May 2007 a new building, designed by the Swiss architect Mario Botta, opened close to the original site. It covers around 55,000 square metres across nine floors, with three further underground levels of parking, and its construction cost roughly 193 million Swiss francs in total. The building's angular volume, lit red at night, made it one of the most visible landmarks on the Lugano shoreline. Its scale, large in relation to a town of fewer than 2,000 residents, drew criticism from some observers as an oversized addition to the lakeside setting.
Bankruptcy and reopening
The casino's finances deteriorated during the 2010s. On 27 July 2018 the Court of Como declared the operating company bankrupt, with debts reported at around 132 million euros, of which 22 million were owed to the municipality itself. The closure cost 109 jobs and left Campione d'Italia's local government in serious financial difficulty, forcing cuts to public services in the town. After three and a half years of closure, the building reopened on 26 January 2022, with around 174 former staff rehired.
Visiting today
Campione d'Italia sits on the lakeshore opposite Lugano, reachable by road through Swiss territory or by boat across the lake. The Botta building remains the dominant structure in the small town, its angular silhouette visible from much of the surrounding shore. Its history since 1917 is closely bound up with that of Campione d'Italia itself: an Italian enclave whose public finances have depended, through war, closure and bankruptcy, on the fortunes of one large building on the water's edge.
The exclave itself predates the casino by centuries: Campione d'Italia became isolated Italian territory through a medieval land grant, and it kept that status even as the modern Swiss and Italian borders solidified around it, leaving it dependent on arrangements with Switzerland for its roads, currency and daily life long before the first casino opened.