Monte Carlo

In the mid-19th century, Monaco was nearly broke. Prince Charles III faced the loss of Menton and Roquebrune, which voted to join France in 1860, taking with them most of the principality's taxable population and agricultural land. His solution was to develop a barren headland called Les Spélugues, the caves, on the eastern promontory of Monaco, and to build a gambling casino there to draw wealthy visitors from across Europe. He authorized the project in 1856, and the first casino opened in 1863.

The name Monte Carlo was formalized in 1866 when the headland was designated a distinct ward of Monaco. Monte is the Italian word for mountain or hill, descended from Latin mons. Carlo is the Italian form of Charles. The compound means, simply, Mount Charles: a naming convention as old as European aristocracy. The choice of Italian reflects Monaco's linguistic position between France and Liguria, where Italian remained the language of the court well into the 19th century.

The Casino de Monte-Carlo, designed by Charles Garnier, the architect of the Paris Opera, opened its current building in 1878. It made Monaco solvent almost at once. Charles III abolished direct taxation on Monegasque citizens in 1869, a policy that still holds today. The name spread as a synonym for Belle Époque glamour: by the 1880s it appeared in novels, travel accounts, and satirical prints across Europe as shorthand for ruinous elegance.

The Monte Carlo Rally, first run in 1911, and the Monaco Grand Prix, first run on the city's streets in 1929, exported the name into motorsport. Mathematicians Stanislaw Ulam and Nicholas Metropolis coined the Monte Carlo method in 1949, naming it after Ulam's uncle's gambling habit and the element of chance both shared. The phrase now belongs as much to computational science as to tourism. A prince's real-estate gamble gave the world a name for mathematical chance.