How the tools work out Italy's holidays and long weekends
Every tool on this site runs in your browser. What you enter, year, town, leave days, stays on your device. The basis is Italian law on public holidays and published computation rules. Sources last read on 28 October 2026.
National public holidays
The list comes from article 2 of Law 260 of 1949, which still names St Joseph, Ascension, Corpus Christi, Saints Peter and Paul and 4 November. Those five dates stopped being holidays for civil purposes with Law 54 of 1977; Presidential Decree 792 of 1985 then restored Epiphany and left 29 June to the city of Rome alone, Law 336 of 2000 brought back 2 June from 2001, and Law 151 of 2025, published in Official Gazette no. 236 of 2025, added 4 October, St Francis of Assisi, from 2026. Each rule in the engine carries the year it applies from: for 2027 the result is 13 holidays, Easter Sunday included.
A holiday that falls on a Saturday or Sunday is not moved to another day: no law provides for it. For the civil holidays that fall on a Sunday, article 5 of Law 260 of 1949 grants an extra day's pay; for the others your collective agreement decides.
Easter and the movable dates
Easter Sunday is computed with Gauss's formula as published by Germany's metrology institute. Easter Monday (Pasquetta) is the day after; Shrove Tuesday falls 47 days before Easter, Ash Wednesday 46, and Milan's Ambrosian carnival ends on the Saturday after Ash Wednesday. A second, independent algorithm (Meeus, Jones, Butcher) repeats the computation for every year from 1600 to 2600: the two agree on all thousand years.
Patron saints
No national law lists patron saints: the patron's day is recognised by collective agreements and custom, and for Rome by Presidential Decree 792 of 1985. So we publish a town only if its patron saint and date can be read on the town's own website or in its charter: 85 towns at present. Each entry links to its source and gives the day we read it. Feasts tied to Easter are computed as an offset from Easter Sunday.
How the long-weekend planner works
The year is split into blocks: free blocks of Saturdays, Sundays and holidays, and working blocks from Monday to Friday. Taking every day of a working block off joins the two free blocks either side of it. Among all combinations the planner picks the one that gives the most consecutive days off for your leave and, on a tie, the one using fewer leave days. It is dynamic programming over the year's blocks: an exact answer, not a rule of thumb. Every chain of leave must touch a holiday that falls on a weekday; an ordinary week of leave with no holiday stays among the days "free to plan". Example for 2027 with no patron saint: 10 leave days give 25 days off in 4 blocks.
Only leave in the chosen year counts. 24 and 31 December are working days by law; if your contract gives them off, set that under "More options".
Working days, weeks and leave
Working days are Monday to Friday (or Saturday, if you choose) without public holidays and, if you choose, without the patron saint's day. Weeks follow ISO 8601: week 1 is the week with the year's first Thursday. Statutory minimum leave follows article 10 of Legislative Decree 66 of 2003: four weeks, at least two in the year they accrue, the rest within the following eighteen months.
School calendar
Start, end and holiday dates come from the Ministry's summary of the 2026/27 regional calendars. A few rows of that summary print an impossible year (2025 for the start of lessons in 2026/27, for example): we correct it and flag the region concerned. Schools may move a few days by their own resolution.
Limits
The tools know nothing of company shutdowns, shift patterns or collective agreements. They do not cover local feasts other than the patron saint that only some agreements recognise, nor closures decided by individual schools.
Updates
We reread the holiday laws and the towns' sources at regular intervals. A change only goes online once every test passes again. Report errors through the contact page; how we correct is in the editorial policy.