March 2016, York Minster library
I am Helena Marchbank. I went in to prove a friend wrong about which casino in Europe was the oldest and came out with a worse problem than the one I started with. Six books. Four confident answers. One of them managed two different dates for the same building eleven pages apart, without noticing.
What was going on was not bad history. It was a word doing three jobs at once. "Oldest" can mean the first licence, the longest unbroken run, or the oldest stones, and those three answers point at three different places. Every writer had silently picked one and then argued with people who had silently picked another.
So this site exists to keep them apart. Every date we publish is labelled as a founding, a continuity, or a building. That one habit turns an unwinnable argument into a set of facts you can check, and it turns out the facts are better than the myth. Venice really did open a state-run gaming house in 1638. It really did close in 1774 and stay closed for 185 years. Both of those are more interesting than "the world's oldest casino, since 1638".
What we do not do
- We do not take money from any venue, operator or gaming authority. There are no affiliate links here and no gambling advertising.
- We do not take bookings, hold reservations or act for anybody. There is no booking form on this site because there is nothing to book.
- We do not write about how to play, odds, systems, bonuses or offers. Not our subject.
- We do not print a fact we cannot source. Where the record runs out we write that it runs out, which is why some of our entries have holes in them.
- We do not have a company number, a registered office or a licence, because we are a chronicle and not a business. Sites in this field invent all three surprisingly often.
The caveat
I have stood inside two of the five buildings in this chronicle. The other three I know from archives, official pages, regional government records and correspondence with press offices. That is a real limit on what I can tell you, and it is the reason this site is strong on 1774 and weak on what the carpet feels like. Where a paragraph rests on reading rather than on being there, it is written that way and you can tell.
The second caveat is smaller and more annoying: prices and door rules move. Entry fees, dress rules and opening hours in these entries carry the date we checked them. After that date the venue's own site is right and we are stale.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, tell me and I will fix it and say that I fixed it. Corrections go out to the mailing list as well as onto the page, because a correction nobody sees is not a correction. Nothing gets quietly edited.
[email protected]. I answer inside three working days, faster if you have caught an error.
Sources
Where operators, regulators and regional governments disagree, we say who says what rather than picking the tidier number. We lean on the owning authority over the venue's own marketing pages, on the regulator over both, and on primary records over travel writing, which in this subject copies itself in circles. There is a worked example of that on the marginalia, involving a quotation that Marlene Dietrich probably never said.