LEGO in Italy: A Peek Inside ItLUG Lecco 2022
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Poster (and MOC) by Roberto Cencig.
The last weekend of July was a crucial weekend for Italian AFOLs. ItLUG’s most important event, ItLUG Lecco, was finally back after having been canceled both in 2020 and 2021. (Disclaimer: since this is my LUG’s event and I’m also one of the organizers, I might be just a tad biased!)
ItLUG Lecco is the longest-running Italian event—it has been going since 2006 (except for 2020 and 2021). At first, it took place in a smaller nearby town called Ballabio but in 2014, we moved to Lecco (a bigger town… and also my birthplace!) mainly because in Ballabio the event was in a school and it was starting to feel too small for us.
In Lecco, the event takes place in the local branch of the Politecnico of Milan university, a modern building that works great for a LEGO event with big classrooms and wide spaces. (The students’ bar is also a huge plus for both AFOLs and visitors… and so is the air conditioning.)
A little queue to get inside!
Registered AFOLs also have an AFOL room (a big classroom) where they can relax, play, and eat and drink food provided by us. For the exhibition, we used three big classrooms, two smaller ones and some of the aisles, where we placed more displays, vendor booths and the Fairy Bricks tombola (it like a raffle for our US readers). The event is meant for both AFOLs and visitors so we have activities for both during the weekend.
An activity we’ve had for more years than I can remember is the robotic sumo and line following tournaments. Our LUG’s robotics team is a pretty good one—they take part in many international competitions (and they seem to be winning a lot of them!) and they organize this tournament that every year gets more and more participants, with lots of kids who seem to be really into it.
Robots are always very popular… (Photo courtesy of Gaetano Chiappa)
An activity for both visitors and AFOLs is “LEGO Serious Play for Parents and Children”, led by one of our members who is also a LEGO Serious Play (LSP) facilitator. It’s a twist on the usual LSP that is generally meant as a work activity in a corporate environment.
It might not look so, but this is serious play! (Photo courtesy of Emiliano Segatto, LSP)
One of the quick MOCs built only with 2x4 bricks in the AFOL room, by Cristiano Grassi.
This year we also had a free building activity to celebrate LEGO’s 90th anniversary. In the AFOL room, members and participants could build what they wanted with a few thousand 2x4 bricks, provided by LEGO.
The event featured an AFOL quiz hosted by AFOLs/YouTubers/Twitchers Jody Padulano and Roberto Ceruti that was a lot of fun, as usual. There were three different games: “Guess the Set”, “Adult or Minor?” (yes, it’s about the age of a set) and “Guess the Theme”. This last one seemed easy… until the theme to guess was Muji. Or Znap. Or X-Pod. It might come as a surprise to you, but I did not win. :-) I never win at this quiz, to be honest!
Fairy Bricks was there with a mosaic for the public to build and their tombola where you always win (and the consolation prizes were, as usual, very cool minifigs… I got a few copies of the new space police guy).
On Saturday evening we had a panel with Sandro Damiano (whose Winter Chalet has been recently released by BrickLink) and Andrea “Norton74” Lattanzio (whose A-Frame Cabin is currently being developed into a real set for LEGO Ideas—and who is a regular guest contributor for BrickNerd), both ItLUG members. They talked about their experiences and answered questions from AFOLs.
Andrea “Norton74” Lattanzio and Sandro Damiano (Photo courtesy of Marcello Oliani).
In the exhibition, there was a huge city layout with a subway underneath the tables and even a “hill” coming down to the floor. I’ll include some of the highlights of the exhibition in the photos below.
We also put up banners featuring LEGO history that we created a few years ago—people always love those. We didn’t do anything special for LEGO’s 90th (except for the building game) because… we tend to do LEGO history-related things all the time anyway! So it’s business as usual, for us.
One of these recurring history things, and as usual my favorite section, is the Vintage Museum coordinated by one of our members who owns a lot of old stuff. And every year he brings something “new” (well, old).
This year we did not have huge international participation (we generally get a fair deal of people from all over Europe). Curiously, besides Kevin (and his driver Matt) from Fairy Bricks and a couple of German sellers, no one came from outside of Italy. This happened for a couple of reasons, I believe. Many people are still not very comfortable with traveling abroad… and we did not promote the event abroad much, not being sure until the very last minute if it could actually happen.
I hope and think that next year we will be able to go back to the way we did it before. Some of us wore masks inside, but that was the only difference from 2019, so no big deal. We were very happy with the turnout, anyway. The same number of participants and the same number of visitors came as before, so the event was a success and everybody is already asking us about next year’s edition.
Group photo on the stairs! (Photo courtesy of Gaetano Chiappa)
So as a parting thought of blatant self promotion: you should join us in Italy next year!
Do you know what Znap is? Do you want to go to Italy? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.
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