Question of the Day - 14 November 2025

This is one that we're not averse to admitting comes from us ourselves. 

On the most recent LVA YouTube jackpot video, a player sent in a photo and story about hitting a royal at a casino in Belgium. He wrote that it's the oldest casino in the world, dating back to 1763. 

That got us curious and for one thing, we couldn't believe we'd never been asked this question before. But after a good hard search, we confirmed that we've never answered it. So we got to work and here's what we found. 

It's generally agreed that Casino di Venezia in Venice, Italy, is the oldest casino in the world. By no means has it been continuously operating for nearly 400 years, but it's widely cited as the oldest that still exists in a form similar to when it opened in 1638. 

When it opened in the 17th century, Casino di Venezia was located in the Ridotto di San Moisè, the Theater Saint Moses, during the Venetian Carnival, itself dating back to the 1100s and known for its elaborate masks, costumes, and parties (the masks allowed for social anonymity, blurring class lines, and the event lasted for months, culminating right before Lent, the precursor to today's Mardi Gras.) 

A wing of the theater hosted gambling games, such as biribissi, a keno-like game in which players placed bets on one of 70 possible outcomes, and bassetta, a cross between blackjack, poker, and gin rummy that paid the big winning hands 60 times the bet. (Later, bassetta was replaced by faro, which eventually migrated to the U.S. and became the most popular game here for a while.) Players gathered in the casino during the long intermissions of plays at the Saint Moses.  

This gambling hall launched the start of the Venetian casino craze and within 100 or so years, the city hosted upwards of 130 of them.  

The original location endured for 136 years, until it closed in 1774 when the morality pendulum swung, as it's wont to do, away from gambling, but the casino (Italian for "little house") remained in the same location, opening and closing through the centuries. In the 1930s, the Municipality of Venice moved it to the Lido of Venice, a seven-mile-long barrier island in the Venetian Lagoon separating it from the Adriatic Sea. (Today, the island hosts the Venetian Film Festival.)

Fifteen or so years later in 1959, it was moved again to Ca' Vendramin Calergi, a 15th-century palace right on the Grand Canal, and it has operated continuously there ever since. The palace also hosts the Wagner Museum, which houses rare documents, musical scores, signed letters, paintings, records, and other heirlooms associated with the German composer and librettist Richard Wagner, who died in the palace in February 1883 from a heart attack at age 69. 

The palace was originally funded by an Italian nobleman and art collector; he commissioned ceiling frescoes and wall paintings by Italian masters, many of which are still in place today. And right on the canal, a free boat service delivers guests directly to the front doors of the casino.