In the mid-19th century, the House of Grimaldi was desperate for cash. Prince Charles III turned to gambling entrepreneur François Blanc, who’d had great success with his casino in Bad Homburg, and invited him to create roulette heaven in Monaco. In 1863, on a plateau used for cultivating olives, lemons and oranges, rose the Casino de Monte-Carlo, still today the most famous gambling house in the world. While Monégasques were, and still are, forbidden from gambling there (the casino was built to give them an income, not to endanger them), Europe’s nobility, aristocracy and filthy rich came flocking. You can still see the clock that reminded gamblers to go back to their villas and hotels along the coast, for at first there was nowhere to stay in Monaco until the Hôtel de Paris was built. All guests of the hotel have free entry to the glorious, gilded Casino (as well as to the Thermes Marins spa and the Monte-Carlo Beach Club), for the two are part and parcel, and together they saved and enriched the principality.
You need to be blessed with good luck to have a good time here. In the entrance of the marble-floored, stucco-ceilinged lobby, now entirely refurbished but still, aficionados say, with its original soul intact, stands a bronze equestrian statue of Louis XIV. The shiny right knee of the horse is testament to the thousands of hands that have rubbed it to give them luck at the tables. Guests can and do win – and lose – millions in a night. “It’s the one thing over which they have no control,” the VIP guest relations manager tells me, “so it’s a thrill.”
Source link : https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/europe/monaco/articles/inside-hotel-de-paris-monte-carlo/
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Publish date : 2019-04-24 03:00:00
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