Essays · by Frater Custos · 6-minute read

Lucca Comics is not a Halloween festival

The largest comics and gaming event in Europe is held across 31 October, in a city half an hour from the village that proclaims itself the Italian capital of Halloween. It looks like a design. It is a calendar, and the date is twenty years older than the arrival of Halloween in Italy.

The association makes itself. End of October, a hundred thousand people in costume inside a walled city, and twenty kilometres away, on the Serchio, the Devil’s Bridge lit up. Every year somebody writes that Lucca Comics & Games «coincides with Halloween», and somebody else that it «is the Italian version of it». It is worth looking at the dates, because they take the thing apart on their own.

Where the event comes from

The first edition is not from Lucca and is not of 1966. It is the Salone Internazionale dei Comics, and it is held at Bordighera, in the province of Imperia, on 21 and 22 February 1965, out of an Italian-French collaboration: the founders are Rinaldo Traini, Romano Calisi and Claude Moliterni. To Lucca the Salone moves the following year, on 24-25 September 1966, in Piazza Napoleone.

From there the story goes by stages: annual until 1976, then biennial; no edition in 1988; the last Salone in 1992. In 1993 «Lucca Comics» is born as a new event, and in November of the same year Lucca Games is born beside it, founded by Renato Genovese, Beniamino Sidoti, Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini and Roberto Gigli on eight hundred square metres. The single name Lucca Comics & Games arrives in 1995; the merger with the historic Salone and the return within the walls in 2006.

The date, set out in order

Here are the editions of the Salone whose exact dates I have been able to reconstruct. The right-hand column should be read bearing in mind that in Italy, in those years, Halloween did not exist: its mass diffusion is of the mid-nineties.

The event has straddled All Saints since 1972 at the least, and in all likelihood from earlier. When at Borgo a Mozzano three friends sat down at a table in the club, in the October of 1994, the Salone of Lucca had occupied that week for more than twenty years.

Why that date? They do not say

I have looked for an explicit statement by the organisers on the choice of the period — in the official press releases, in the historical archive of the event, in the materials of Lucca Crea. I have found none.

The explanation everybody gives, and which is reasonable, is the All Saints long weekend: 1 November is a public holiday in Italy, the schools close, many people do not work, and a fair that lives on a young public has its catchment available on those days. It is a solid inference. But it is an inference, not a source, and in these pages the difference must be marked: none of the organisers, in sixty years, has put it in writing.

And in the official materials Halloween is absent

This is the check that settles the matter. I went and read the official closing press release of the 2025 edition, the one with the accounts and the figures, issued on 2 November.

It contains not a single reference to Halloween. Nor, for that matter, to All Saints. There is no theme, no allusion, no claim. In the official programmes 31 October is not «Halloween night»: it is «the third day». The overlap is one of calendar, not of content, and it is not claimed even by those who would gain from it.

The association between the two things, in short, is not a choice of the organisers: it is an inference of the public and of the press, who see a great many people in costume in the same week and draw their conclusion. Cosplay dressing-up and Halloween dressing-up have the costume in common, and nothing else: one quotes a character, the other an idea of fear.

The coincidence that is interesting instead

There is, however, one way in which the overlap does say something, and it is not the one that gets told.

Lucca Comics is there because 1 November is a holiday. 1 November is a holiday because it is All Saints. And All Saints falls on 1 November for reasons that nobody can explain: the date is attested by a letter of Alcuin of York of the year 800, but as to why the feast moved there from 13 May the New Catholic Encyclopedia states openly that there is no scholarly consensus. I have told it at length elsewhere, together with the thesis — which does not hold — that that date was chosen to cover the Celtic Samain.

That is: a comics fair of 1965 finds itself in the calendar where it is because of an early medieval liturgical decision whose motive historians do not know. This is the true continuity between Lucca Comics and the ancient history of those days — a continuity of civil calendar, banal and documentable, with nothing ritual about it. True continuities are almost always duller and sounder than the ones people would like to find.