On the eastern shore of Lake Lugano lies an Italian municipality of 2.7 square kilometres with no land connection to Italy. All around it is Switzerland, canton of Ticino. Anyone travelling from Campione d'Italia to Italy drives through another country.
Europe has several such exclaves. Campione stood out because the town drew the practical conclusion. It was Italian sovereign territory and lived, for all everyday purposes, as part of Switzerland.
The municipality belonged to the Swiss customs area, and there were no customs checks between Campione and the Switzerland around it. People paid in francs. Mail ran through Switzerland with a Swiss postcode. Phone numbers, electricity and daily supplies came from Ticino. Politically, fiscally and legally, everything stayed Italian.
This arrangement was carried for decades by a casino. It was the municipality's main source of income and employed a substantial share of the working population. As long as it ran, it financed the local budget and a good part of the families on the slope above the lake. Many of the staff lived in the neighbouring Ticino communes and crossed a state border every day that was not one in practice.
2018
The casino files for insolvency and closes. By far the largest employer in the municipality disappears.
2020
Campione moves from the Swiss into the EU customs territory. The Swiss postcode 6911 lapses and mail is routed through Italy.
after that
A citizens' committee appeals to the Italian president to reverse the move. Without success.
A Brexit in reverse: that is what the residents called joining their own customs territory.
— TerraTally · Borders desk
Why the switch hit so hard
From a distance, being folded into the customs territory of your own state looks like a normalisation. On the ground it was a rupture. An economy geared for decades to duty-free trade with the surrounding area suddenly had to organise itself around a border that had barely existed before. Deliveries that used to arrive down the road without any formality now needed paperwork.
Then there was the timing. The change followed immediately on the loss of the biggest employer. A town already absorbing a collapse was handed new procedures, new authorities and new costs on top. Residents fought back, all the way up to the president, and got nowhere.
Exclaves do not work because their legal status is settled. They work when daily life is arranged pragmatically, and that almost always means attaching yourself to the neighbour rather than to your own country. That was the strength of Campione, and it was equally its dependency. For a place with no land link to its own state, that is not a weakness but the only way to function at all.
Such arrangements are agreements, not laws of nature. They can be cancelled, usually for reasons that have nothing to do with the place itself. For Campione the customs status was not a detail but the foundation. Once it fell away, the geography remained: an Italian village with another country all around it.