Monte Carlo

Monte Carlo is, more than any other place in this atlas, a town built around a single casino. Princess Caroline and financier François Blanc engineered the district in the 1860s specifically to save Monaco from bankruptcy, and the plan worked so thoroughly that the principality has had no income tax for its residents since. Everything in the immediate quarter — the Hôtel de Paris, the Café de Paris, the Opéra de Monte-Carlo built into the same complex as the casino — was designed as a single, self-reinforcing resort.

That means a visit to Monte Carlo's casino district doubles as a walk through one of the most concentrated pieces of Belle Époque town planning in Europe, terraced above the harbour and the Mediterranean. The gaming itself sits alongside Formula 1's Monaco Grand Prix, superyacht traffic in the harbour below, and a permanent undercurrent of old European wealth that the town has cultivated deliberately since Garnier's day.