Lucca Comics & Games Convention
The Top Italian Comics Fair Attracts 85,000 Visitors Each Fall
For over forty years, the Italian city of Lucca has been playing host to Italy's leading expo event for comic art, illustration, gaming and multimedia.
Nestled in its stout ring of Renaissance walls now converted into an elegant promenade, the relaxed, gentle town of Lucca in Tuscany has little to betray its status as Italy's capital city of comics.
That is, unless you happen to pass by the Museo Nazionale del Fumetto e dell'Immagine (National Museum of Comics) on Piazza San Romano, launched in 2001 to celebrate the best Italian comic characters and authors.
Yet it's in the Fall, with the annual Lucca Comics & Games fair and convention, that the city's penchant for comics really bursts to life.
Some history
Traces of comic art first showed in Lucca's DNA in 1966, when the city inherited a cartoon fair started the previous year in the Ligurian seaside resort of Bordighera.
When the event was transferred to Rome in the early Nineties after almost thirty years, Lucca had positively become addicted to comics, and launched its own event dedicated to comic art and illustration: 'Lucca Comics'. Soon followed 'Lucca Games', dedicated to gaming including role games, board games, collectible card games and 3-dimensional wargaming.
More recently, two more sections were added: 'Lucca Junior' (for projects aimed at 0-12 year olds) and 'Lucca Multimedia' (about the latest technologies in both cinema and videogames).
The convention
Stretching over a dedicated area 16,000 square meters (over 172,000 square feet) in several attractive locations of the charming city center, Lucca Comics & Games attracts yearly some 85 thousand visitors and over 360 exhibitors from all over Italy (and way beyond!) over one long weekend between late October and early November.
In fact, over the years, Lucca Comics & Games has earned a well deserved reputation for its ability to identify the best, most exciting signs of things to come, and insiders consider it an authoritative showcase of new international talent.
As a consequence, publishers, comic authors and artists, illustrators critics, distributors, retailers, collectors, dealers and armies of fans all flock to Lucca for arguably the most colourful, boisterous event after Italy's celebrated carnivals, offering a well assorted mix of trade stalls, talks, screenings, workshops, exhibits and partying.
Vocabulary basics
'Fumetto', the Italian word for 'comics', actually means 'speech balloon'. It was first used in 1942 and stems from the shape of the bubble resembling a cloud of smoke ('fumo' in Italian).
Practicalities
- Lucca Comics & Games runs over 4 days between October and November. Both exhibitor forms and visitor info can be downoaded from the official website.
- The Museo Nazionale del Fumetto e dell'Immagine is open 10am to 7pm daily except Mondays.
