The city’s most historic and beautiful spa, the-closed-to-the-public Lázně I (or Spa 1, formerly known as Kaiserbad), located on Mírové náměstí, was used as the exterior of the titled Casino Royale. It is here that Casino Royale ends, with Bond tracking down the elusive mastermind Mr White, shooting him in the leg and then introducing himself. The exterior of Prague’s Ministry of Transport and the interior of Vitkov Monument’s history museum in Vitkov Park were the shooting locations of the film’s Miami Body Worlds exhibit. On Delancy Street in Nassau, the yellow mansion of the now-closed Buena Vista Hotel served as the exterior for the Madagascan Embassy in the film. Craig was not the first Bond to film in the Bahamian capital of Nassau, but he probably spends the most screen time among its sites. While the 1967 version of Casino Royal — a goofy, star-studded spoof starring Peter Sellers, Woody Allen and Orson Wells — takes you on a journey to Ireland, Scotland and England, by following in the footsteps of the 2006 version starring Daniel Craig — a relatively realistic, if modern, adaptation of Ian Fleming’s first novel — takes you on an arresting tour of historic Venice and the Czech Republic and leaves you lounging in the warm climes of the Bahamas and Italy’s Lake Como.
The city’s international airport, Ruzyne, (and the Nassau airport in the Bahamas) features in the film as the airport in Miami, Florida. Just a few hundred metres away is the high-end Grandhotel Pupp, which served as Bond and Lynd’s Hotel Splendide in the film. However there are only a few opportunities every year to tour the studio and its costumes department. Both Sean Connery’s Thunderball and Roger Moore’s The Spy Who Loved Me shot in and around the area, but Casino Royale takes a more contemporary tour of the city, especially the area called Paradise Island, located just over the Atlanis or Paradise Island bridge from downtown Nassau. More in keeping with the plot lines of the Fleming novels, this new cinema Bond is a flawed (if stylish) hero who is severely brutalized, both physically and emotionally. On the southwest side of New Providence Island, about 25km from Nassau, is the pretty seaside resort community of Albany, named after the Albany House, a pink colonial mansion once owned by Jean Chalopin, the creator of an animated Bond bastardization, the bumbling hero Inspector Gadget. The resort hotel’s small, stand-alone lobby was transformed into the interior of the Casino Royale where Bond plays his death defying poker match with terrorist financier Le Chiffre.
The building also serves as the home of the villain Dimitrios in Casino Royale. Most of Casino Royale was shot in the beautiful and relatively inexpensive Czech Republic — primarily in Prague’s fabled Barrandov Studios, known as the “Hollywood of the East” for its use in films including Mission Impossible, the Bourne Identity and Amadeus. One of refreshing aspects of Craig’s reboot is the realism it brought the franchise — at least in comparison to the cheesy jokes, comic book villains and baffling plans of world domination in earlier films. En route to the fictional Montenegro Casino Royale, Craig walks through the terraced, statue-filled Italianate Versailles Gardens of the luxurious One and Only Ocean Club. Although the famously beautiful and romantic canalled city has appeared in From Russia With Love and Moonraker, Bond’s arrival in Casino Royale, sailing on a 54ft yacht along the Grand Canal, is arguably the most stylish, filmed in an epic sweeping shot.
But the most memorable location (spoiler alert) is the collapsing palace where Vesper meets her end, locked in an elevator as the building sinks into the Grand Canal. The building in the film, the 17th-century Palazzo Pisani Moretta, did not really sink (that was recreated in a sound stage), and it is closed to the public except for special events like its annual masquerade ball Il Ballo del Doge, held during Carnevale in March or February. The One and Only is also rightfully typecast as a Bahamian hotel in the film, and Bond and Lynd stay there — Villa 1085 to be precise. And if you want to really take it to a luxury level fitting the Bond motif, consider renting out one of the rooms in the lakeside Villa La Gaeta, a stunning castellated private home with its own beach near Menaggio on Lake Como. But when it comes time for his convalescence, he still gets a luxury view: the stunning terraced gardens of Villa del Balbianello, an Italian villa on the western shore of Lake Como near the village of Lenno.
