Bricks in Florence Festival 2021
/A few days ago I attended Bricks in Florence Festival, one of the most important Italian LEGO events that takes place every November in Florence, Italy, in a theater on the north shore of the Arno river.
I’m going to have to start this post on a sad note, though. This event was established in 2017 by my dear friend Gianluca Cannalire, with the help of Nico Mascagni, Fabio Maiorana and other AFOLs from Tuscany. Gianluca had joined my LUG, ItLUG (the national Italian LUG), a few years before and he had been a breath of fresh air, bringing a lot of new ideas and basically creating around him the community in Tuscany that was virtually non-existant before. So he founded a local LUG, ToscanaBricks, in order to collaborate with other communities, the way things should be. He was also for many years a member of my LUG’s board, like me, and even though we fought over many topics, we were real friends.
Sadly, about a year ago he came down with COVID-19 and ended up in the hospital. He wasn’t in ICU, but he had to use a ventilator and we joked with him that he looked like an astronaut. Exactly one year ago, on November 19, 2020, we were exchanging funny memes on WhatsApp in the morning, then he went silent… and a few hours later I received a call by Nico telling me that Gianluca had passed away.
Words can’t express how much we owe him and how much we miss him, so I won’t even try. I’ll just say that I’m so glad that ToscanaBricks decided to go on with the event this year. I’m sure he’d be proud of how this edition turned out to be. And of course this edition was dedicated to his memory.
There was a table with some of his MOCs: he wasn’t a “Master Builder” when it came to LEGO bricks, but he definitely was when it came to building a community (that’s what the message on the table says.)
The table with Gianluca’s MOCs.
Moving on to the event… here in Italy we still have to wear masks inside, keep our distance from each other and we need a corona pass to enter places like this venue, but if you ignore such small details, it definitely felt like we were back before the pandemic. Everything felt normal, following rules was easy and - as far as I know - no one got sick!
The venue, TuscanyHall, is basically a concert hall. It’s not huge, but the available space is quite good: there’s a stage (where there was a toy photography exhibition and children could go and build freely with used parts), the hall itself, where some big tables were placed for MOCs, and then a gallery that looks over the hall, opposed to the stage, with more photographs and smaller MOCs on the tables. The different areas were also given proper names for the event: the hall was “Godtfred Room” and the gallery was divided into two sections: “Kjeld Gallery” and “Ole Gallery”. The stage was called “Leg Godt”.
The map of the event and the exhibitors list.
Last, but not least, we had a wonderful AFOL lounge, with talks, games and food. That’s where I spent most of my time… not just because it wasn’t as crowded as the rest of the event (crowds still make me a bit uneasy), but for the food! for the talks and activities and because that’s the place where you can actually get to talk to other AFOLs and friends in a more relaxed (and during these times, safe) environment. I’d seen a few friends in Skærbæk, and before that, at Verona Model Expo (another important Italian event), and finally here I got to see everyone else who couldn’t make it to the previous ones. It was really great and it finally felt “normal”.
This event is generally quite international, but this year, for the current situation, it wasn’t really promoted abroad. Some people still came, though! Kev and Leanne from Fairy Bricks, Asociatia Brickenburg from Romania sent Razvan and Carla, and then there was this guy Are from Norway, with his wife Karen… I don’t know if you’ve heard of him, I hear he’s quite popular! Jokes apart, it was nice to see people come from at least Europe, I hope that next year it will be even better and it will be possible to have more people from all over the world.
Let me now briefly focus on AFOL activities; there were more of them for the public, but we’re mainly interested in AFOL activities. Saturday was the day of the talks, and I was there, at least partially, for all of them.
The first talk was “History Through LEGO Bricks” by a real historian, Stefano Bartolini (very interesting talk about LEGO and history, mentioning projects like Brick to the Past), followed by a workshop about LEGO Photography by ItLUG’s and Brickcentral’s Marco Zanconi. Then, Italian AFOL and train master builder Claudio Calzoni presented his new book about Italian LEGO Trains and InstaBrick gave us an update about their now well-known brick identifier product.
Professional labels by Invisible Bricks.
Last, but not least, Marcello Oliani from Invisible Bricks previewed their upcoming product. We might need to get back to this in a future article, when it will actually be launched, but, to summarize, they’ll sell labels to organize our parts collection. There already are some labels out there (some extremely good!), but this project takes it a step forward and they will actually print the labels, not just publish them online. That’s for both the lazy people who won’t be bothered printing them because they hate printers (like me!) and those who want to be sure their labels are professionally printed on high-quality paper. They had some prototypes ready, we’ll see how this will go, it sure sounds interesting.
On Saturday night we had the AFOL dinner in the lounge, while on Sunday there was a speed building tournament with various phases that lasted all day.
Back to the hall, let me just highlight a few of the MOCs that I found most interesting.
I’ll start with this amazing Scrooge Mc Duck’s Money Bin from the 1987 DuckTales TV series by builder David Lambertucci from MarcheBrick. David is well known in Italy for his love of the Yellow Castle and his tendency to build curved walls by taking advantage of leeway and tolerance. In this case, he used this technique vertically, to build the side walls of the bin, and the result is fantastic. The spheric dome of the bin looks great too (and that was conceived here in Italy in 1965 by one of the greatest Disney cartoonists of all time, Romano Scarpa!)
Another amazing MOC was Antonio Cerretti’s Temple of Divus Julius. Antonio, a member of RomaBrick and ItLUG, is specialized in wonderful MOCs from ancient and Medieval Rome and this is just one of them… a small (!) one.
Another build I found amazing was this minifig-scale Hogwarts, by Federico Neri. It’s not finished yet (so it basically just sits on the table), but what is there is huge and wonderful.
Final mention for the 1980’s Town layout by the Romagnani brothers from ToscanaBricks. When I was a child, I didn’t really build MOCs, my creativity went into stuff like this, town layouts… on an extremely smaller scale, of course. So seeing a layout like this is like a dream come true.
Every exhibitor received a swag bag that included:
Event minifig
Event 1x8 brick
Event 2x4 tile
Two red FFP2/N95 masks (everything in this event is red)
A bag of new LEGO parts
A sample from the upcoming Invisible Bricks product (including a hidden homage to Gianluca… the avatar he used everywhere, the minifig skull head)
Some Haribo sweets, following the BrickLink tradition!
A T-shirt was also available to buy (only for participants) with five steps of the evolution of the 2x4 brick (ABB, hollow brick, tubes, Minitalia/OLO, cross support), somewhat inspired by this award we had made in 2018.
There was also a foldable leaflet, available for everyone, with info about the event, a map of the venue, the list of exhibitors and, on the back, an outline of LEGO colors through the years. Choices were made, of course, so only colors available in at least 50 different parts were considered.
LEGO Colors by decades.
“With 20 LEGO bricks you can build a car… come and find out what we did with thousands!”
I would also like to point out how brilliant the poster of the event was. I believe that LEGO’s restrictive rules about advertisements like “don’t use the minifigure” will force you to be creative and come up with something that’s so much better. Well, sometimes, at least, and this is one of those times!
The icing on the cake was the accommodation: low-cost camping not far away from the venue (15 minutes on foot, down the riverfront) and near a pub where we also had breakfast.
If next year things are back to 100% normal, I definitely suggest you pay this event a visit. Also, it’s Florence, one of the most beautiful cities in the world, your NLS will want to come too!
Would you visit Florence for a LEGO convention? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.
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