When to come to Italy
The wrong questions most travelers ask and the three that you should be asking
The piazza in Marina di Pietrasanta on the fifteenth of August looks the way the rest of Italy thinks Italy is supposed to look, and that is the problem.
It is forty in the shade. The bar I drink at every other day of the year has a sign on the door reading chiuso per ferie fino al venticinque agosto. The farmacia across the way has the same sign. So does the dry cleaner, the framer, the macelleria, the cartoleria, the dentist, the lawyer who shares the building with the dentist, and the small bookshop on the corner. The man who runs the bookshop posts a paper note in the window that says I am at the sea. The sea is two kilometers away, and he is, in the literal sense, at it. So is half the country.
The piazza is not empty, exactly. It has been replaced. The Versilians who normally use it have left for the mountains or somewhere quieter, and in their place are eight thousand visitors paying three times the normal room rate only to be told that the trattoria across the road is fully booked for the next ten days. The waiter at the one place still open is a nineteen-year-old from Bergamo who has been parachuted in for two weeks of summer work and does not know what tordelli are. The beachside bagnos charge 50 euros for two loungers and an umbrella. The temperature is high enough that the dog under our table will not move when a car horn goes off, and the air is the kind of soft, humid weight that makes you understand, for the first time, why the rest of the year Italians wear scarves indoors.
This is the country at its worst. It is also the version of Italy that the largest number of foreign tourists experience, because August is when schools are closed in their countries, and they fly in to find out what the postcards are about, only to find a country that is not really there.
The standard travel advice on when to come to Italy says spring or autumn for the shoulder season, summer for the beach, and winter for the cities. This is the advice every publication runs, and it is optimized for everyone and therefore for nobody. It also ignores the three questions that actually determine when you should come.
Here are the three questions.
1. Do you want to swim in the sea?
This is the binary. Almost no other source of advice on Italy frames it this way, and it is the only frame that matters.
If you want to swim in the Mediterranean, you have a narrow window. The sea on the Tyrrhenian and Adriatic coasts gets warm enough to swim in around the middle of June and stays warm enough until roughly the third week of September. Inside that window, the coastal Italy you have read about is functional: the bagni are open, the seafront restaurants are running, the boats go out, the water is twenty-three degrees, and you can stay in for an hour. Outside that window, the sea is below twenty, and you will not enjoy it unless you are German.
If swimming is the trip, you accept the costs. The costs are real. Hotel rates double or triple. Restaurants book out two weeks in advance. The autostrada on a Saturday in late July is a parking lot from Bologna to the Tuscan coast. The bagno charges fifty euros, which runs at fifteen off-season. The country is loud and crowded, and the temperature is the highest it gets all year. You go for the water. You make peace with the rest.
Be careful with what counts as wanting to swim. If what you actually want is a beach holiday (sun on the sand, a long lunch on a terrace, a walk by the water, a spritz at six), you can have all of that in May or in late September with the sea at nineteen degrees, no swimming, ten times fewer people, and a third the price. The bagni are still open. The waiters know what tordelli are because they live here. The town belongs to the people who live in it. The only thing missing is going into the water.
That trade is the whole game. If you can sacrifice the swim, every other month works better than summer. Every other month. Yes, including January and December. We will get to that.
2. What are your options?
This is the easiest question, and also the one most people get wrong because they answer it before the others.
If you have school-age children and your school year ends in late June and starts again in early September, your options are mostly the summer. This is true for half the world’s families, and it is one of the structural reasons the European holiday economy is shaped the way it is. If you are in this position, you are coming in the summer, and the question becomes which weeks of summer cause the least pain. The answer is the first half of June and the second half of September. Avoid the last week of July through the third week of August at any cost.
If you do not have children in the school system, your options open up dramatically, and you should use that freedom. We do not have children, work online, and the only constraint on our travel calendar is our bank balance. This is a privilege I am aware of. It is also worth noting that most standard travel advice for Italy is written for a school calendar audience and silently assumes you are in it. If you are not in it, you should treat the standard advice as not addressed to you.
The professional traveler's question is whether you can take a Tuesday-Thursday trip in February or a Wednesday-to-Tuesday trip in late October. If you can, you have unlocked a different country.
3. Where in Italy are you going?
The third question is the one most travel pieces collapse into a single Italian climate, which does not exist.
Italy is a thousand-kilometer-long peninsula running from the Alps to the latitude of Tunis, with a major mountain range down its spine. Sicily in November averages fifteen to twenty degrees, sometimes rainy and windy, sometimes flat blue sky. Tuscany in the same November is around ten degrees, mostly dry, with the kind of slow autumn light that makes the hill towns look the way they look in oil paintings. Trieste or Turin in November is closer to freezing. Houses in the north are properly insulated and double-glazed. Houses in the south are not, because the south needs air movement nine months of the year, and a few weeks of cold are not worth a heating system. If you stay in a Sicilian agriturismo in February, it can be twenty degrees outside and seven degrees inside the bedroom, and you will sleep in two jumpers.
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So the rule is geographic.
The south. Anything from Rome down. The best months are October through November and April through May. Not too hot, not crowded, and not too cold and uncomfortable. Sicily and Calabria are the warmest of the lot. Sicily in late February has almond blossom, twenty degrees on a good day, and the Greek temples at Agrigento with no one in them. The food is what the locals eat. The ferries to the smaller islands have stopped for the winter, which is a real loss, but everything on the main island is open and operating at half the summer price.
Central Italy. Tuscany, Umbria, the Marche, and Lazio. This is the most flexible region. Year-round except in the summer. Spring and autumn are the postcard versions. Winter is colder than the south but mostly dry, and the hill towns in February have something the August tourist never sees: they belong to the people who live in them. The trattorie serve their own food. You can park in Lucca on a Saturday morning. The Uffizi has a queue you can walk through.
The north. Milan, Turin, Venice, the Dolomites, the lakes. The cities work all year and arguably work best in the cold months, when the fog hangs in the courtyards, and the aperitivo moves indoors, and the risotto alla milanese tastes the way it is supposed to taste. The mountains have two seasons: ski season from December through March, and walking season from June through September. The lakes are best in May and October when the gardens are at their peak, and the day-trip boats from Milan are not running constantly.
The point is that when to come to Italy depends on where in Italy you are going, and the calendar varies by six weeks at either end depending on the latitude. Anyone who tells you October is the perfect month for Italy has not been to the Dolomites in October, where it is already snowing, or to Palermo in October, where it is twenty-eight degrees and the beaches are still busy.
The August problem
If there is one rule from this whole piece, this is it. Do not come to Italy in August.
August is the worst month, and for a structural reason unrelated to heat or crowds. August is the month when the entire country closes for its own holiday, which has a name and a date. Ferragosto falls on the fifteenth of August, the feast of the Assumption, and it is the center of a two-week-to-three-week shutdown that empties most Italian cities and floods every coastal town and mountain valley with the same Italians who have left.
The history is, briefly, this. The festival has Roman roots. Augustus instituted Feriae Augusti in 18 BCE, a rest period after the harvest and before the vendemmia. The Catholic Church absorbed it in the seventh century by aligning it with the Assumption of Mary. The modern shape of it, the country-closes-for-two-weeks shape, was set in 1931 when Mussolini’s government instituted the treni popolari di Ferragosto: discounted trains to the seaside and the mountains for the working classes who could not otherwise afford a holiday. The state-organized mass exodus stuck. Ninety-five years later, the entire country still does it, on roughly the same dates, in the same direction.
Which means: the farmacia in your foreign-resident neighborhood is closed for ten days. The bar that opens at seven on every other day of the year is closed. The trattoria you wanted to eat at posted chiuso per ferie on the door three weeks ago. The dentist is in the Dolomites. The lawyer is on a sailboat in Sardinia. The pension you are paying three hundred euros a night to stay at is staffed by people who have been hired for the two weeks because the regulars are also at the sea. The cities are emptier than at any other time of year. The coasts are fuller than at any other time of year. Every system that normally runs is running at half-strength or not at all.
If you arrive in Rome on the fourteenth of August expecting the postcard, you will get an empty echo chamber. If you arrive in Forte dei Marmi expecting an exclusive seaside town, you will get a nine-thousand-person traffic jam from Camaiore. If you arrive anywhere in Italy on the fifteenth of August expecting to find things open, you will be wrong.
The simplest rule is: do not book a trip that includes the second or third week of August. The next-simplest rule is: if you have to come in August, come in the first week and be out by the eleventh. The third rule, which we live by, is to leave the country during the three weeks around Ferragosto. Sophia and I go to England every August. We come back on the twenty-fifth, when the country has just woken up, the farmacia is open again, the bar has just turned the lights back on, and the trattoria across the road is doing the first dinner service of the new season. It is, paradoxically, the best moment of the entire year to be in Versilia.
The wild card months
Once you accept that summer is the wrong answer for most people most of the time, the rest of the calendar opens up.
February. The dark horse. The cold months in central Italy are mostly dry. The hill towns are quiet. I have walked into the Cinque Terre on a January day with three layers of clothing under a raincoat, no rain, full sun, and seen Riomaggiore the way you are not supposed to be able to see it anymore, almost without tourists, two German walkers, and a woman from Vernazza walking her dog. I have done Pisa in February. The tower is not empty because it is the Tower of Pisa, but you do not have to fight through anything; you do not stand in line for an hour to take a photograph, and the surrounding piazza belongs to local people running their errands. Sicily in late February is the warm move: twenty degrees, almond blossom, the Greek temples without crowds, agriturismi at off-season prices.
March and April. Spring is starting. The flowers are coming. Easter is the one trap to watch for in this window. Easter week brings a surge of foreign tourists to Rome, Florence, and the Tuscan hill towns, with a particular concentration of teenage school groups. Avoid the seven days around Easter, and the rest of April is one of the best months of the year.
May. Excellent until the last week, when the shoulder season starts to bleed into the high season. I am writing this in May, and Lerici, a town on the Ligurian coast that is not normally crowded before June, was so full this past Saturday that I had to circle twice for parking. Italians have noticed that May is good and they are arriving earlier each year. May still works, but the secret is out.
Late September and October. The other strong window. The country just had an August. The harvests are happening. The sea is still warm enough to swim in until the third week of September, if that matters to you. The air in October is the air the August tourist will never feel: clear, dry, low light, the kind of golden Tuscan afternoon you book a trip in February to find. October is, for travel purposes, summer with the volume turned down by eighty percent.
November. Underrated, especially in the south. Twenty degrees in Sicily, fifteen in Naples, twelve in Rome. The food is at its best because the truffle and mushroom seasons are happening in central Italy, and the new oil is being pressed in Tuscany and Liguria.
December and January. The cold months. Italians use them. The cities are at their winter best. Christmas markets in the north, the presepio tradition everywhere, the panettone and pandoro fights. New Year’s is busy in the cities and quiet on the coasts. January is the cheapest month of the year to fly to Italy. If you can take a week in late January in Rome or Florence, you will have those cities to yourself in a way that simply is not possible during any other month.
I am not telling you not to come in the summer. If you have school-age children, summer is your window. If swimming in the Mediterranean is the trip, summer is your window. If you have always dreamed of the Italian high season and want to find out what the postcards are like in person, summer is your window.
But if you have a choice, and you have asked yourself the three questions honestly, the answer almost always points away from June, July, and August. The Italy worth coming to is the Italy the locals live in, and the locals live in it from September through May. They use August to escape it. The smartest thing a foreign visitor can do is align with the local calendar, not against it.
If you arrive in summer and the bagno is fifty euros, the trattoria is full, the streets are too loud, the heat is heavy, and you are fighting through crowds to take a photograph of a fountain, the problem is not Italy. Italy is fine. Italy is excellent. You picked the wrong week.
Pick a different one. Almost any of them will work.
