The global capital of creativity and imaginative culture prepares for its 60th anniversary!
October 28th to November 1st, 2026. If you’re like us, you’ll be popping those dates in your diary, because that’s when the next action-packed, fun-filled edition of Lucca Comics & Games takes place. The 2025 event confirms Lucca as the world’s largest pop culture festival, with over 280,000 tickets sold (in comparison, San Diego Comic Con’s “official” attendance numbers are between 135,000-150,000).
Attendance at Lucca Comics & Games has grown to more than 900 guests, 730 exhibitors, 30,000 cosplayers for 1,500 events and 12 exhibitions, with 17,000 professionals attending to the largest community of its kind in the world. Over 90,000 active users logged on to the LuccaCG Assistant app. And it all takes place in an incredible walled city – it’s as if someone said, “Let’s hold MCM Comic Con, but spread it across the whole of the city of Chester.”
And 2026 promises to be an even bigger party, as the pop-culture festival celebrates its 60th anniversary. The Salone Internazionale dei Comics (International Comics Salon), which eventually became Lucca Comics & Games, was first held in 1965 in Bordighera, Italy. However, it moved to the city of Lucca the following year, in 1966, where it has been celebrated annually. The event marked its 30th anniversary by officially changing its name to Lucca Comics & Games in 1996. Today, it is the largest comics festival in Europe and the second biggest in the world after Comiket in Japan.
It isn’t all about the comics, though, and we were happy to see that Lucca Comics & Games affords tabletop gaming the same level of respect as movies, TV, music and other art forms.
“Really sincerely, I think Lucca Comics & Games should be congratulated for the amount of cultural significance they give to games as well as comics,” says Sir Ian Livingstone, co-founder of Games Workshop. “I think nowhere else in the world celebrates games in the cultural sense as much as Lucca does. You can see a lot of commercial exhibitions around the world – in the United States, in Japan, in Europe and in the UK, of course. But here they celebrate the art and the medium and the creators, and that’s amazing.”