The 2026 Winter Paralympics begin in eight days, inside a 2,000-year-old Roman arena in Verona. If you've been following the buildup to these Games at all, this is the moment the whole thing finally arrives.

The Opening Ceremony takes place March 6 at 7:30 PM local time in Italy, which is 1:30 PM ET in the U.S. It streams live on Peacock, with additional coverage on NBC, USA Network, and CNBC.

The Venue

The Arena di Verona is not a sports venue. Built in the first century AD, it has operated as one of the world's great outdoor performance spaces for nearly two millennia. It is best known as an opera stage, which gives you some sense of what it feels like to sit inside it. For the night of March 6, 665 Paralympic athletes from around the world will march through it.

This is the first Paralympic Opening Ceremony held in a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The Organizing Committee also invested €20 million in accessibility improvements throughout Verona ahead of the Games. That investment runs through the city itself, not just the arena. Making an ancient city genuinely accessible for athletes, staff, and spectators with disabilities is its own statement about what these Games are trying to be.

The ceremony is titled "Life in Motion," produced by Filmmaster Group under Ceremonies Director Maria Laura Iascone. The framing centers on transformation and the human ability to move through limits. For a Paralympic Opening Ceremony, that framing does a lot of work.

What You'll See

Stewart Copeland, drummer and co-founder of The Police, headlines the musical program. Alongside him is Meduza, the Italian house music trio whose productions have crossed from club culture into global mainstream radio over the past five years. Placing a rock institution next to a contemporary Italian act inside a Roman amphitheater is a creative choice that fits the scale of the event.

The finale brings the ceremony home with "Nel blu dipinto di blu," Domenico Modugno's 1958 Italian song known internationally as "Volare." Through an initiative called Volare Milano Cortina 2026, the organizers collected vocal contributions from the public for use in the closing performance. The idea of people around the world singing together through a 68-year-old Italian ballad to close a Paralympic Opening Ceremony in Verona is hard to picture until it happens, and then it will probably make complete sense.

The Closing Ceremony on March 15 takes place at the Cortina Olympic Ice Stadium, titled "Italian Souvenir," with Italian singer Arisa performing.

The Full Scope of the Games

If you're catching up before the opening, here is the complete picture: March 6 through March 15, across Milan, Cortina d'Ampezzo, and Verona. Six sports on the program: Para alpine skiing, Para biathlon, Para cross-country skiing, Para ice hockey, Para snowboard, and wheelchair curling. Seventy-nine medal events, and around 665 athletes competing, the largest field in Winter Paralympic history.

This edition also marks the 50th anniversary of the Winter Games, which debuted in Örnsköldsvik, Sweden in 1976 with 53 athletes competing in two sports. Fifty years. Six hundred and sixty-five athletes. A Roman arena in northern Italy. That arc is something.

How to Watch

Peacock is carrying all 79 medal events live through March 15, the most comprehensive Paralympic broadcast NBCUniversal has produced. That means you can watch the ceremony live on March 6 at 1:30 PM ET and then follow competition daily through March 15 without missing anything. If you've been waiting for a Games where Paralympic coverage is available in full, this is it.

Schedules and streaming information are at NBC Olympics and the IPC's official site.

The Torch Gets There First

The Paralympic Flame has been traveling through Italy since February 24, when it was lit at Stoke Mandeville in the United Kingdom. Today it passes through Rome; it continues south to Bari and Naples before heading north through Bologna. On March 3, five regional flames converge in Cortina in a Union Ceremony, becoming one flame for the first time.

Five hundred and one torchbearers. Two thousand kilometers. Eleven days crossing Italy. The flame reaches Verona on March 6 to light the cauldron.

The athletes who will march into the arena that night have been working toward this moment far longer than the torch has been traveling. March 6 is where both journeys end up.