Il Festival Dello Spettacolo

From the newsstand to the stage

Il Festival dello Spettacolo is not a band, a comedian or a touring production. It is an entertainment convention, invented in 2025 by TV Sorrisi e Canzoni, the Mondadori Group weekly that has covered Italian television since the 1950s, and built on a simple premise: the magazine's readers should be able to stand in the same room as the people it writes about. Aldo Vitali, the magazine's director, described it at launch as an attempt to bring the title's community physically close to the figures it covers, and after the first edition put it more plainly — the festival grew out of a wish to move Sorrisi from the page to the stage.

The venue was chosen to match the ambition. Superstudio Più, at via Tortona 27 in the Porta Genova district of Milan, gives the festival more than 10,000 square metres of industrial space, and the organisers broke it into zones rather than a single auditorium: a main stage seating 1,800, a cinema and streaming area, a sport zone, a music club built around younger artists, a food area and a children's section. The announced partners for the first run were SIAE, Ticketmaster and Radio 105.

The pitch at the time was that nothing in Italy, or in Europe, covered all of entertainment's separate constituencies — music, film, television, series, sport, food and children's programming — under one roof across one weekend. Whether or not that claim stands up in full, it describes the shape of the thing accurately: a trade fair's floor plan running on a broadcaster's talent list.

The first edition, and what it actually produced

The inaugural festival ran from Friday 24 to Sunday 26 October 2025. The closing figures released by Mondadori two days later: 15,000 attendances across the weekend, more than 300 guests, 160 separate shows, three evenings of music and 22 Telegatti awarded. The programme pages on the Sorrisi site and on Ticketmaster were visited by more than 200,000 people in the run-up.

The music programming was broad rather than headline-led. Showcases and performances across the three days took in Giorgia, Il Volo, Renato Zero, Alfa — who was given a Telegatto — Emma, Irama, Levante, Clementino, Gigi D'Alessio, Rocco Hunt, Rovazzi and Sarah Toscano, several of them staged with Radio 105. The social numbers were pushed hard afterwards: over 200 pieces of content across Instagram and TikTok during the three days, almost four million users reached and nine million video views, with the TikTok audience reported as 73 per cent millennial.

Those figures were enough to secure a second edition and, more importantly, to settle the format. The 2025 run established that the draw was proximity — cast meetings, masterclasses, workshops, cooking demonstrations and unannounced musical performances — rather than a conventional bill of concerts.

The Telegatto, taken out of the archive

The most loaded element of the festival is a gold cat. The Telegatto was conceived in 1971 and first awarded at a ceremony in 1984; it was sponsored by TV Sorrisi e Canzoni and broadcast on Canale 5, and for two decades it functioned as Italian television's own prize list. It ran until 2008, with a suspension in 2005, and the ceremony was cancelled in 2009. A revival was floated in March 2018, with the magazine's director sketching an October return in Milan hosted by Carlo Conti, but the show never materialised.

Reviving it inside a paying public festival rather than as a televised gala is the significant move. Twenty-two were handed out in 2025, and for the second edition the organisers have said the statuettes will be presented as surprises to guests during the weekend — no nominations list, no envelope, no broadcast ceremony. For a magazine whose authority rested partly on the award, bringing it back as a live, unscheduled moment on a festival floor is a deliberate reframing of what the prize is for.

The 2026 edition: who is on, and where

The second edition takes place on 6, 7 and 8 November 2026, again at Superstudio Più. The announced scale is more than 80 appointments and over 100 guests from television, music, cinema and Italian drama. The floor has been formalised into three named stages — Sorrisi Arena, Sorrisi Stage and Sorrisi Club — plus an Off Stage area, a Glass Box operated by Rai, a Food Network food-truck zone and a space given over to Geronimo Stilton.

Gerry Scotti opens the festival at noon on the Friday, with Stefano De Martino appearing the same day to talk about Sanremo and the X Factor 2026 judges also scheduled for the opening day. Samurai Jay has a showcase in the late afternoon of Saturday 7 November, and Gabry Ponte closes the weekend on the Sunday. The music side also includes Gianna Nannini, Annalisa, Noemi, Pooh, Cristina D'Avena, Malika Ayane, Elettra Lamborghini and Sal Da Vinci, who won the Sanremo Festival in February 2026 with "Per sempre sì".

Announcements through July and the autumn added Alberto Angela, Can Yaman, Caterina Balivo, Jerry Calà, Paolo Bonolis, Carlo Conti, Antonella Clerici, Marco Liorni, Pino Insegno, Ficarra & Picone, Serena Rossi, Claudio Santamaria and Francesca Chillemi, alongside a news and sport strand with Gian Marco Chiocci, Paolo Del Debbio and Monica Bertini. The MasterChef Italia judges take part, and several programmes bring participatory versions of themselves: decorating workshops tied to Bake Off, valuations in the manner of Cash or Trash, property consultations lifted from the house-hunting formats.

Competitions, and a route in for people who are not on television

Two talent strands were attached to the 2026 edition, both of which end with something concrete. The Vertical Music Contest took submissions of unreleased songs by video until 15 September 2026; the best entries can be performed at the festival and the winner takes a distribution contract with ADA Music Italy. The first film competition is open to authors of unpublished audiovisual work in three categories — Frame Stories for shorts, Opera Next for features and Docu Horizon for documentaries — with winners receiving the Sorrisi Award.

The second edition also carries a charitable mechanism: ticket buyers can add a two-euro donation to ActionAid at checkout.

Standing now

Eighteen months after it was announced, the festival has gone from an untested idea to a fixed November date in Milan's events calendar, with a second edition larger in guest count than the first and a programme published in mid-October 2026, three weeks before the doors opened. Vitali's framing for the second run leaned on the previous year's turnout: the public response, he said, confirmed how much appetite there is for genuine encounters between audiences and performers.

The open question is geography. Mondadori Media has talked about future editions being spread across more than one city, which would turn a single Milan weekend into a touring property. For now it remains one site, one weekend, and a floor plan that depends on the magazine's access to Italian broadcasting to fill it.