The Casbah Club, where it all began for the Beatles

Par Gino Castaldo (The Republic)

When I learned that the Casbah Club – the place where the Beatles story began – was going to be transformed into a series of apartments offered on Airbnb, I remembered an exciting adventure I had with Ernesto Assante. In 2012 we had a crazy and fun idea. In collaboration with a travel agency, we organized, with around thirty people registered, a guided tour of Liverpool around the places associated with the astonishing history of the Beatles. We knew these places well: John Lennon’s house, Strawberry Field, Penny Lane, the Cavern Club and many more. But there was one that we had never explored before, a place shrouded in a certain mystery and little known: the Casbah Club. It was mentioned in biographies and other stories, but we didn’t know much about it, for a simple reason: more than a real club, the Casbah was above all the basement…