A traditional Italian funeral procession recently wound its way through the streets of Lugano, a picturesque lakefront town in northern Italy. The participants were not mourning the loss of a loved one, but of a casino—the Casino di Campione d’Italia, which closed its doors last summer.
According to multiple news reports, the paraders carried signs saying, “Give us back our dignity,” “Give us back our jobs,” and “You left an entire country behind.” It was the latest in a long line of protests since the financially troubled gaming hall shut its doors on July 27, 2018.
Union leader Paolo Bortoluzzi of the Italian General Confederation of Labor (CGIL) said, “Campione has always been a mirror to Italy with many poorly managed resources.
“Campione has been failed,” he said. “We need some serious intervention from our political forces as the lives of hundreds of Italian families are at risk.”
Bortoluzzi noted “the peculiarity of the territory and the strong professional specialization of its inhabitants” as reasons the casino could be viable under the management of “a serious controlled and controllable company. It is the duty of the Italian government to give Campione its dignity back.”
According to a January report in the U.K. Telegraph, the closure of the historic casino, which first opened in 1917, “threatens to take down with it a 2,000-inhabitant village whose livelihood has revolved around the gambling house since it first opened as an espionage front for gathering intelligence from foreign diplomats during the First World War.”
The casino on the Swiss border closed in 1919, then reopened in 1933 under a still-valid decree “requiring its income to cover the costs of operating the municipality, a law aimed at protecting the city that paradoxically may end up killing it,” the Telegraph reported.
For years revenues from the casino were sufficient to support the community, with the Casinò di Campione one of a handful of legal casinos in the region. In 2007, a modernistic, nine-story lakefront palace replaced the old casino, with more than 55,000 square meters (593,000 square feet) of space. The timing could not have been worse; in 2008, along with the rest of the globe, Italy was plunged into a recession that still has a grip on the country’s economy. Along with the recession, the strengthening of the Swiss franc against the euro and legalization of slot machines and other forms of gambling threw the casino into debt, to the tune of s€73 million (US$82 million).
According to the Telegraph, “Campione residents fear if the state doesn’t step in soon, their paradise nestled below the Swiss Alps risks becoming a città fantasma, a ghost town haunted by the giant shuttered casino in its midst.”
