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Open hours are posted at most Italian businesses, shops, and sightseeing attractions—sometimes helpfully in both Italian and English.
You know how you naturally get sleepy in the middle of the afternoon?
Well, Mediterranean (and Latin American) countries have always kept attuned to the biorhythms that American culture tries to ignore, and they’ve found a way to work around the body’s internal clock.
You might know it as the siesta. In Italy, it is called riposo.
During riposo, most museums, churches, shops, businesses—just about everything except restaurants—lower the shutters and lock the doors so that proprietors can either go home (or head to a local trattoria) for a long lunch and perhaps a snooze during the day’s hottest hours
This traditional early afternoon shutdown varies from business to business, but usually lasts about 90 minutes to two hours. It may begin anywhere from noon and 1:30pm and run until anywhere from 2:30 to 4pm.
At first this break can be extremely annoying to the tourist, especially if you’re on a tight sightseeing schedule, but after a while you get used to it. Learn to take the riposo and revel in it. If your time is short, make sure you know which sights (often churches) will be open during riposo and save them to visit at that time.
Sadly, the United States’s economic influence is slowly forcing the rest of the world to live and work according to our hectic, stressful, non-stop schedule. Increasingly, businesses in larger cities are staying open through the middle of the day, and people are taking smaller, quicker lunches and bigger dinners (which any nutritionist will tell you is a trend in the wrong direction). It’s good news for shoppers, but bad news for the general pace and quality of life.
Very broadly, here are the open hours for most things a tourists will want to do in Italy. Keep in mind that these can vary dramatically. Some sights may only open from 11am to 1pm two days a week; other may be open daily from 7am to 11:30pm (in summer, major sights sometimes post such extended evening hours). Still, this will give you a ballpark.
Remember: churches—crammed with frescoes, oil paintings, mosaics, and sculptures—tend to be major sights in Italy. Also, I'm giving just the serving hours for restaurants; though the kitchen may close at 10pm, the joint will likely stay open until midnight or later.
When I write "6:30am/8am" it means that a place might open anywhere between those two bookend times.
Since the precise hours of a riposo vary so much, rather than muddle the times below with ranges for riposo, I'll just insert the word [riposo] in there to remind you that things are likely to be shut for an hour or two in the middle of the day.
Keep in mind that Italy uses the 24-hour clock—what we call "military time"—rather than am and pm. So if a posted hours sign says, say "Feriali 10–18, Festivi 11–13," that means "Open Mon–Sat 10am–6pm, Sun and holidays 11am–1pm." Ah, but what do "feriali" and "festivi" mean?
That's one more quirk. Many businesses, museums, railways, and other places that post schedules dealing with days of the week don't use specific days, but rather something more akin to what we would term "weekdays" and "weekends." However, they don't divide the week up quite the way Americans do. Here's how to interpret signs, train schedules, and other places with posted hours:
On Sundays, most shops are closed, as are many restaurants (though some will open for lunch).
Some museums are closed Sundays, and many others have curtailed hours (usually open mornings only).
Most churches will be closed to tourists in the morning since, though they are often among the biggest tourist sights in town, their primary purpose is as houses of worship. (You're welcome to attend the services, of course; just don't be a tourist about it: sit politely in a pew, don't wander about gawking at frescoes and altarpieces, and for goodness sake don't take photographs.)
Mondays are worse. You're usually fine on churches and shops, but most museums and many restaurants are closed entirely.
(By law, most restaurants are forced to close at least one day a week—though, increasingly, many are finding loopholes to get around this—and the vast majority pick Monday.)
There are some other fiddly rules and habits (like the fact that most grocers in Rome close Thursday afternoons), but nothing that will impact your trip enough to worry about.
How do you deal with Sundays and Mondays? First, be sure Monday is not the only day (or one of your only two days) in a city or town filled with museums. Second, plan to do about half as much on Sundays as you would on a weekday.
Most importantly, find the sights and restaurants in town that are open on Mondays or on Sunday afternoons and save them for those times when everything else will be closed.
Here's how to interpret closed signs posted at restaurants, shops, and sights. Since it will also be handy to know which days a particular shop is "chiuso per turno," there's a list of the days of the week in Italian in the box on the right.
* Note: On Italian signs, the word "per" is often abbreviated "x"—which makes sense when you know that "per" (which can mean "by" or "for") is the preposition Italians use as shorthand for "multiplied by."
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This article was written by Reid Bramblett and was last updated in January 2013.
All information was accurate at the time.
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