As you can probably imagine, the Christmas holidays are a big deal in Italy, where the confluence of its rich culinary culture and longstanding religious traditions creates a festive season that is truly special.
Italians celebrate the holidays with unique food, decorations, and customs. In this week’s newsletter, we’re highlighting some of the most iconic foods and traditions of the season. Read on, you might find some of them surprising!
Italy’s Unique Holiday Traditions: Food
Christmas Eve in Italy — la Vigilia — is just as important as Christmas Day, and a lavish seafood dinner is the main event of the evening. This tradition has its roots in Catholicism, where no meat is to be eaten before a holy day in order to purify the body in advance of the sacred celebration. With its multiple courses, typically featuring a variety of decadent shellfish, Christmas Eve dinner in Italy does leave one wondering just how purifying this meal really is.
Of course, no Christmas Eve dinner would be complete without dessert, and this is when panettone takes center stage at the Italian table.
Panettone is a delectable, sweet, leavened bread, traditionally studded with candied peel and raisins. If you’ve never seen a panettone before, think of a giant muffin weighing about two pounds (although they do come in smaller and larger sizes, such as the gigantic one featured at the top of this post). Although the classic Panettone is ubiquitous throughout Italy, innovative flavour combinations, incorporating such ingredients as chocolate, pears, figs, raspberries, pistachios, walnuts, and limoncello, have become very popular.
While panettone is a delectable dessert, the author of this newsletter also loves it for breakfast, lightly toasted with butter (but I would never admit that to any of my friends in Italy).
Italy’s Unique Holiday Traditions: Decorations
During the Christmas holiday season in Italy — which runs from December 8 (the Feast of the Immaculate Conception) until January 6 (Epiphany) — streets are decorated with lights and giant Christmas trees illuminate the piazzas, as you would expect.
What’s unique about Italy during the holidays is the abundance of nativity scenes, called presepi in Italian. You’ll find them everywhere: in churches, certainly, but also in public areas, shops, cafés, and homes. The styles range from classic to modern, often with contemporary characters such as pizza makers, politicians, and sports heroes sprinkled amongst the usual shepherds, wise men, and animals surrounding the manger.
Naples is famous for its nativity scenes and figurines, with a whole street dedicated to their artisan production: Via San Gregorio.
Italy’s Unique Holiday Traditions: Games, Gifts, and Santa
Italians love to play cards, and the already lively Christmas gatherings in Italy get even more spirited when the cards come out, since Italians typically play for money. Another popular game is Tombola, which is the Italian version of bingo (also played for money).
It’s common in Italy to open gifts on Christmas Eve, after the big dinner or at midnight (although the Christmas Eve feast in Italy usually carries on til midnight, or beyond.)
In Italy, Santa Claus is called Babbo Natale, which translates as “Father Christmas”. The word “babbo” means “dad” in Italian. Well, it really isn’t an Italian word, it’s Toscano — the vernacular spoken in Tuscany. (If you hear kids calling their father “babbo” and you are outside of Tuscany, you can pretty much bet they are a vacationing or relocated Tuscan family.)
While Babbo Natale is a part of Christmas traditions in Italy, the focus of the season is those all-important components of Italian culture: food and family. As we know, Italians do everything with panache, and there are few times of the year in which this is better evidenced than at Christmastime. In this season of giving thanks, the precious gifts of family togetherness and the earth's abundance come wrapped in impressive decorative bling, animated by the most exuberant gameplaying you ever saw.
Whatever your holiday traditions, DriverInRome wishes you a festive season filled with happiness.
