Italy's first casino did not open in Sanremo or in Venice but in Ospedaletti, inside a villa put up between 1883 and 1884 on the Riviera di Ponente. It was commissioned by the Société Foncière Lyonnaise, the French company then turning this stretch of coast into a winter resort; the design is by the Nice architect Sébastien Marcel Biasini, and the wall decoration was signed by the painter Rodolfo Morgari. The gaming house ran for a little over twenty years, until 1905, when the licence went back to the prefecture and was bought by neighbouring Sanremo, which used it to launch its own municipal Casinò. Villa La Sultana then became the seat of a private club.
What to see
Anyone arriving today finds a ruin, and it is better to know that in advance: the building has stood abandoned for more than half a century and in 2006 a large fire finished the job. What survives is the nineteenth-century volume and the layout of the façade, still readable from the road, with its regular rhythm of openings and a scale out of all proportion to the village of the time — and it is the disproportion that tells the whole story.
Rodolfo Morgari's wall paintings were the real calling card of the gaming room, and they are the most serious loss: virtually nothing of that decorative scheme can be seen now. It helps to remember who came through here: an international clientele stepping off the trains of the Genoa-Ventimiglia line, opened in the eighteen-seventies, who chose Ospedaletti as a winter station before Sanremo became the social capital of the Riviera.
Visiting
There is no visit in any real sense: the structure is unsafe and fenced off, you look at it from outside, and there are no opening hours or tickets. Ospedaletti is reached from the Aurelia road between Sanremo and Bordighera, and it is one end of the cycle and foot path laid on the disused bed of the Genoa-Ventimiglia railway: arrive by bike and you enter the town from exactly there. The best way to frame the villa is still to walk the seafront slowly.
Our editors' tip
We would tie the stop to a walk as far as corso Regina Margherita, the axis the Société Foncière Lyonnaise traced along with twelve other new streets after singling out Ospedaletti, in August 1880, as a possible winter and summer resort. Line them up — the villa, the avenue, the disused railway station — and these pieces tell the story of a French property gamble on the Riviera that lasted a little over twenty years and today reads almost only through ruins and place names. Bring a telephoto lens: what is left of this building comes across best when you close in on the details.