There are things that can be done all year round but that become real nightmares during the Christmas holidays. Here are the ten things not to do at Christmas in Italy (aside from drinking champagne).

The ten things not to do at Christmas in Italy.

  1. Travel by train. If you think you can do any stretch that goes from any point to the north to any point further south, even if only for a kilometer, you are off the road. There are people who book intercity trains in January to return from Milan to Bari.
  2. Visit your aunt in Milan. If you think that going against the north-south current is good for something, you are wrong. Reaching any point, including your aunt's house in Milan, will become like a video game in which you have to fight against endless flows of cars and people. Stay home, it's better.
  3. Go for a walk downtown. Especially if you live outside the city or outside the country, forget to go for a walk downtown. At every step you will meet an old friend of the grandmother who wants to know what you have been doing in the last ten years. And in any case find it, the parking in the center.
  4. Open facebook. If you have the good habit of not using social media, continue not to. Between chains of letters, pre-packaged wishes and messages from strangers who are very keen to wish you all the best in the world, facebook is like a sponge: it will absorb every moment of your time. And without realizing it you will find yourself at Easter.
  5. Meeting in Rome. It is useless to hold meetings in Rome. Since the first cold weather begins, if you set up any type of project, your Roman interlocutor's response will be: “let's let Christmas go by and let's talk about it”.
  1. Take a girl out for dinner. During the holidays there is a problem: everyone is in all the restaurants. People who never go out to eat, go out every night during the holidays. So if you take a girl out - if you find a place - you'll end up meeting everyone you've been dating since high school. Better to propose a tea. But at a time like three o'clock.
  2. Go on a diet. If you really think about taking advantage of your holidays to get fit, you have not understood the essence of Italy: eating. Anyone you go to visit will offer you expanses of chocolate, riots of sweets of all kinds, which are added to all the food they have given you. Better to wait for February.
  3. Go to the gym. Probably because of the guilt related to the binges people who make annual passes to the gym, but that no one has ever seen, crowd the equipment rooms. A great time to socialize. Impossible to train.
  4. Go to the mountains. And do you think you can see the snow? If you try to line up all the people who are alone in Cortina during the holidays in a train you will leave from there and you will arrive approximately in Ancona.
  5. Go to midnight mass. I don't even know if a Mass is valid in which if you don't arrive an hour and a half earlier you end up having to follow it from the sacristy, how many people there are. They say that Italians are no longer practicing religious. We see that at Christmas they forget about it.

And these were the ten things not to do at Christmas in Italy. Do you have others in mind?

The ten things not to do at Christmas in Italy last edit: 2019-12-20T14:00:00+01:00 da Paolo Gambi

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