Holidays in Italy

Official national public holidays. Regional and religious observances may vary by area.

About Time in Italy

The Ten Days That Never Happened

By the sixteenth century the Julian calendar, in continuous use since Julius Caesar introduced it in 45 BC, had drifted about ten days out of step with the seasons, since its assumed year of 365.25 days ran roughly eleven minutes too long. The practical consequence troubled the Church more than anyone else: the date fixed for Easter, tied to the spring equinox as reckoned at the Council of Nicaea in 325, was slipping steadily later into the season. The mathematical fix that eventually solved the problem came from Luigi Lilio, a physician and astronomer from Cirò in Calabria who died before seeing it adopted; his proposal, refined by the German Jesuit mathematician Christopher Clavius, dropped a leap day in century years not divisible by 400, bringing the average year to within about 26 seconds of the true solar year.

Pope Gregory XIII promulgated the reform in the bull Inter gravissimas in February 1582, and to close the accumulated ten-day gap in one stroke, the calendar simply skipped forward: in the countries that adopted it immediately, including the Italian states, Thursday 4 October 1582 was followed the next day by Friday 15 October. Ordinary people went to bed and woke up eleven calendar days later than they expected, with no days of their lives actually lost. Protestant and Orthodox Europe took the change far more slowly and suspiciously, since it had been ordered by a pope acting on the authority of a Catholic council; Britain and its colonies did not adopt it until 1752, and Greece held out until 1923, so for nearly three and a half centuries the date in one part of Europe could legitimately differ from the date in another by ten, eleven, twelve or thirteen days depending on where and when you asked.

A Clock With Seven Faces and No Survivors

In Padua in 1344, the physician and astronomer Jacopo Dondi built a clock for the tower of the Palazzo Capitaniato that went beyond marking the hour: its face combined the positions of the sun and moon with the zodiac, letting anyone glance up and read the astrological relationship between the two. His son Giovanni, who grew up around the project, spent sixteen years, from 1348 to 1364, building something considerably more ambitious of his own, a device he called the astrarium. Finished when he was still in his thirties, it had seven dials and roughly 107 moving parts, displaying not only the time but the positions of the sun, the moon and the five planets known to medieval astronomy, along with the dates of movable religious feasts, all driven by mechanisms Giovanni designed to model the Ptolemaic theory of planetary motion then in scholarly use.

Neither clock survives. Jacopo's was destroyed in 1390 during fighting between Padua and Milan and later rebuilt to a similar design; Giovanni's astrarium itself has been lost since sometime after his death; but because he wrote a detailed technical treatise, the Tractatus astrarii, describing every component well enough to reconstruct it, modern clockmakers have since built working replicas from his own four-hundred-year-old instructions, including one held by the Smithsonian Institution. The treatise itself is one of the earliest known complete technical descriptions of a mechanical device anywhere in Europe, predated by only a few years by a comparable English manuscript.

The Idea That Arrived Decades Too Early

As a young man watching a lamp swing in Pisa Cathedral, Galileo Galilei noticed something a clockmaker would later find extraordinarily useful: he timed the swings against his own pulse and found that a pendulum takes the same time to complete a wide swing as a narrow one, publishing his account of this isochronism in 1602. It took nearly four decades for him to connect the observation to clock design. In 1641, blind and near the end of his life, Galileo worked out a scheme for a pendulum-regulated escapement and, unable to draw it himself, dictated the design to his son Vincenzio, who sketched it and began building a working model.

Both father and son died before the clock was finished, Galileo in 1642 and Vincenzio not long after resuming the project in 1649, and the half-built mechanism then sat forgotten for a decade. It was only in 1659, when Galileo's student and biographer Vincenzo Viviani retrieved the incomplete model and drawing at the request of a Medici prince, that the design became known at all, a full year after Christiaan Huygens had already published his own, independently developed pendulum clock in the Netherlands and had one built and running. Galileo's insight had arrived at least fifteen years ahead of anyone else's working clock; his health, his blindness and simple misfortune meant Italy never got the chance to build it first.

The Cannon That Tipped the Pots

Political unification, not international treaty, finally gave the peninsula one clock. As late as 1866 six separate railway times were in use across the newly formed kingdom, centred on Turin, Verona, Florence, Rome, Naples and Palermo, forcing travellers to reset their watches at every regional crossing. A royal decree of 22 September that year fixed continental Italy's railways, telegraphs and post offices to the mean time of Rome from the start of the winter timetable that December, with Sicily and Sardinia initially kept on their own separate meridians through Palermo and Cagliari respectively. Florence, still transmitting its own signal from the old Specola observatory tower by dropping a flag and ringing the bell of the Palazzo Vecchio at local noon, held out on its own time for another twelve years before falling in line with Rome in 1878.

From 1899, midday in Florence was announced a different way entirely: a noon cannon, fired on the initiative of the military authorities, known locally and affectionately as the votapentole, the pot-tipper, for the startled reaction it produced in kitchens across the city, and it kept firing daily until 1935. National uniformity finally reached completion in 1893, when Italy adopted Central European Time in line with its neighbours; at the moment the change took effect at midnight on 1 November that year, clocks in continental Italy read 23:49, in Sicily 23:53, and in Sardinia 23:36, three different local moments folded at last into a single national hour.

Frequently Asked Questions