The Ridotto, Venice
The Republic of Venice opens a state-controlled gambling house; it closes in 1774. Source
History
Four centuries of the house
The word casino comes from the Italian for “little house”. This page follows that house from a government-run gambling room in Venice to the integrated resorts of Asia - with a source for every date and a section on the histories of the nine casinos we review.
A Venetian solution to a Venetian problem
In 1638 the Great Council of Venice opened the Ridotto in a wing of Palazzo Dandolo to bring the city’s carnival gambling under control and tax. It is generally described as the first government-sanctioned gambling house in Europe; it closed in 1774 when reformers argued it was ruining the nobility. Casinò di Venezia, today housed in Ca’ Vendramin Calergi, traces its lineage to it.
The next chapter is German and French. Baden-Baden’s Kurhaus, built in 1824 by Friedrich Weinbrenner, had gaming rooms from the outset and boomed when France banned gambling in 1838. Monaco copied the model: the Société des Bains de Mer was founded by sovereign order in 1863, François Blanc took the concession, and the present Casino de Monte-Carlo building opened in 1865 - the Hôtel de Paris, reviewed on this site, had opened beside it a year earlier.
Dates that matter
Each entry links to the encyclopaedic source we used.
Kurhaus Baden-Baden
Weinbrenner’s spa house opens with gaming rooms; international fame follows France’s 1838 gambling ban. Source
Société des Bains de Mer
Monaco creates SBM; the current Casino de Monte-Carlo opens in 1865 and Charles Garnier enlarges it in 1878-79. Source
Nevada legalises gambling
The state law that made Las Vegas possible; El Rancho Vegas opens as the first Strip resort in 1941 and the Flamingo in 1946. Source
Casino Velden
Austria’s fifth casino opens on the Wörthersee promenade; rebuilt and reopened in 1989. Source
Caesars Palace
The themed megaresort era begins; the International Hotel (1969) and The Mirage (1989) set new scales. Source
Atlantic City
After a 1976 referendum, Resorts Atlantic City becomes the first legal casino in the eastern United States. Source
Casino Copenhagen
Denmark’s first international casino opens on 31 December inside the Scandinavia hotel, in partnership with Casinos Austria. Source
Bellagio
Steve Wynn’s $1.6 billion resort opens on the site of the Dunes, then the most expensive ever built; The Venetian follows in 1999. Source
Macau liberalises
The end of the STDM monopoly; Sands Macao opens in 2004 and Macau overtakes the Strip’s revenue in 2007. Source
Singapore’s integrated resorts
Marina Bay Sands and Resorts World Sentosa open, coining the term “integrated resort”. Source
Olympic Park Casino, Tallinn
Olympic Entertainment Group opens the first Hilton in the Baltics around its 1,600 m² flagship casino. Source
From casino with rooms to resort with a casino
The Las Vegas resorts of the 1990s reversed the old order: the casino financed the building, but the reason to come became the fountains, the art gallery, the celebrity chefs and the theatre. Singapore made this explicit in 2010 by licensing “integrated resorts” - hotel, convention centre, museum, retail and theatre with a casino as one component, under some of the world’s tightest social safeguards.
European casino hotels went the other way and stayed small. Casino Copenhagen occupies three floors of a business hotel; Casino Velden faces its 41-room hotel across a lakeside promenade; the Casino de Monte-Carlo still checks passports at the door and sends men in shorts home after two in the afternoon.
- 1969 - International Hotel starts the megaresort era in Las Vegas
- 1989 - The Mirage, first resort of the modern Strip
- 2010 - Marina Bay Sands: S$8 billion, 2,500+ rooms, one casino
- 2016 - Hilton Tallinn Park built by a casino operator
Three casinos with long histories
Each review contains a dedicated casino-history chapter written from the operator’s and encyclopaedic sources.
See the present-day list
Nine casino hotels reviewed with the same sourced approach as this history.