Campione d'Italia: an enclave between two systems

A Milanese relic on Lake Lugano

Campione d'Italia is an Italian municipality in the province of Como, situated on the eastern shore of Lake Lugano opposite the city and entirely surrounded by Swiss territory and Swiss waters. It owes its existence to the bequest of 777 by which a local landowner left his property to the monastery of Sant'Ambrogio in Milan, which Chapter A.I describes. Because Campione belonged to a Milanese church, it was not part of the bailiwick of Lugano when the Confederates took the region in the early sixteenth century, remaining Milanese and later Italian.¹ The enclave covers about 2.7 square kilometres and has fewer than two thousand inhabitants. In daily life it is tied to Switzerland. Although the euro is its only legal tender, the Swiss franc has been its main operating currency, and calls to Campione from Italy require the Swiss dialling code. Until its entry into the customs territory of the European Union on 1 January 2020 it used Swiss vehicle registration plates of the Canton of Ticino and Swiss refuse collection, and mail could be addressed with a Swiss as well as an Italian postal code. Its electricity, by contrast, comes from Italy.²

For the financial centre Campione is a curiosity with a practical lesson. Its residents are Italian tax residents, and banks and fiduciaries in Lugano must treat them as Italian clients for the purposes of the automatic exchange of information and of the Italian rules on cross-border services discussed in Chapters E.II and E.IV. At the same time the enclave shows, in concentrated form, what happens to a territory that lives on the boundary between two legal and monetary systems and depends on a single source of income.

The casino and its collapse

That source of income was the casino. The Casinò di Campione opened in 1917, closed in 1919 and reopened permanently in 1933. For most of the twentieth century it was one of the largest casinos in Europe and drew clients from Milan, Lugano and the whole of northern Italy. Its owner was the municipality, whose public services and salaries the casino's profits financed at a level far above that of comparable Italian municipalities. Between 2006 and 2018 the casino transferred CHF 577.375 million, about EUR 530 million, to the municipal budget, which by then paid 103 municipal employees.³

The model collapsed in the 2010s. The financial crisis of 2008, the growth of online gambling, the opening of casinos in Lugano and Mendrisio and the weakness of the euro against the franc, which raised the casino's costs in francs relative to its revenue, eroded its position. On 27 July 2018 the casino was declared bankrupt with debts of about EUR 130 million. It had employed 482 persons directly, and about 300 further jobs depended on it, which together amounted to nearly half of the local workforce. The municipality, deprived of its income, fell into financial distress.⁴ Criminal proceedings were opened against seventeen persons, including former mayors and administrators, on charges that included abuse of office and false accounting in the management of the casino's and the municipality's finances. In June 2021 the proceedings were still pending. The persons concerned are presumed innocent unless convicted by a final judgment.⁵

In June 2021 the court of Como approved a plan for the reopening of the casino under a composition with creditors. The plan foresaw the rehiring of 174 employees at first, rising to 280 within five years, and a reduction of personnel costs from about EUR 50 million a year to less than EUR 11 million. It projected gaming revenue of EUR 41 million in the first year, rising to EUR 80 million in the fifth.⁶ The casino reopened at the beginning of 2022. In its first year it achieved revenue of EUR 46 million and an operating result of EUR 20 million with 172 employees. According to Milano Finanza, the court of Como confirmed the composition in December 2022. The relationship between the casino's management and the municipality, its sole shareholder, remained difficult: the chief executive described it as "dialectical".⁷

Notes

1. See Chapter A.I; Wikipedia, "Campione d'Italia", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campione_d %27Italia (bequest of 777; the abbey retained Campione when the surrounding territory passed to the Confederates in 1512), used as a last resort. ↩
2. Wikipedia, "Campione d'Italia", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campione_d%27Italia (area 2.68 km², 1,848 inhabitants in 2026, Swiss franc as main operating currency, dialling code +41, TI plates, postal codes CH-6911 and IT-22061, electricity from Italy), used as a last resort; FOCBS, information of 1 January 2020 (below), for the change of customs territory. ↩
3. "La nuova scommessa a Campione d'Italia", Il Post, 18 June 2021, https://www.ilpost.it/2021/06/18/casino-campione-italia-riapertura/. ↩
4. Ibid. (closure on 27 July 2018, debts of EUR 130 million, 482 employees and more than 300 indirect jobs; financial distress of the municipality in 2018 because of the missing transfers from the casino). ↩
5. Ibid. (reporting that seventeen persons faced trial). ↩
6. Ibid. ↩
7. "Casinò di Campione d'Italia, dal fallimento alla riapertura: ecco tutti i conti", Milano Finanza, 3 February 2023, https://www.milanofinanza.it/news/casino-di-campione-d-italia-dal-fallimento-alla-riapertura-ecco-tutti-i-conti-ma-lo-scontro-con-il-comune-202302032157237559 (results at one year from the reopening at the end of January 2023; confirmation of the concordato preventivo by the court of Como published in December 2022). Wikipedia, "Campione d'Italia" (above), gives 26 January 2022 as the date of reopening. ↩

For general information only. This article does not constitute legal or tax advice, does not replace advice on an individual case and creates no lawyer-client relationship. It reflects the legal position as of August 2025.