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What time is it in Italy?
Time zones in Italy and dealing with the 24-hour clock
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Italy—like most of Western Europe—is six hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time (or one hour ahead of GMT, Greenwich Mean Time). That means when it's 1pm in New York and 10am in San Francisco, it's 7pm in Rome, Florence, and Venice.
(For the record, Greece and Eastern are are one hour ahead of Italy; Great Britain, Ireland, Portugal, and Iceland are all one hour behind.)
What time Is It? 16:30 (Huh?)
Most Italian use the 24-hour clock—known to us Yanks as "military time," though you'll never hear an Italian bark out a phrase like "at oh-six-hundred hours," not even in Italian (and not just because few Italians are silly enough to be awake at that ungodly hour).
They just refer to the morning hours like we do—9:00, 10:00, 11:43, etc. (However, they don't often use a ":" to separate hours from minutes; they either use a period, or nothing at all.) At noon they write 12:00, and when it gets to be 1pm they write 13:00, and then go take a nap (you gotta love riposo).
The evening passeggiata stroll beings around 1700 (5pm), then you head to dinner anywhere between 1900 (7pm—though only tourists eat that early) and 2130 (9:30pm). The day ends at 24:00 (that's midnight), after which there's a wee hour when the minutes tick off 0:01, 0:02, 0:03...
Just remember: If the hour is greater than 12, subtract 12 and add a "pm" in your head. That way, 20:00 becomes 8pm (time to start heading to dinner).
That's all for signs posted in windows. When speaking, however, Italians might use either the 24-hour-clock number, or a 12-hour-clock number followed by the phrase del pomeriggio ("of the afternoon"). That means if you ask someone che oro sono? (what time is it?) at 3pm, they may say sono le quindici ("it's fifteen o'clock") or they might say sono le tre di pomeriggio ("it's three of the afternoon").
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This material was last updated February 2011. All information was accurate at the time.
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