Hover a line for its translation; hover a word for its meaning. Tap 🔊 to hear it.
Generate a brand-new dialog on any topic, using this lesson's 0 vocab words — plus any words you add below.
Sign in to generate dialogues. It needs a pass — the first ten lessons of every course are free either way.
Why everything is shut, and when it is free
Opening hours are the single most reliable way to waste a day in Italy. Outside the largest cities, shops and offices still close for a long midday pausa — roughly one to four, sometimes later in the south in summer — and reopen until seven or eight. A business that advertises orario continuato is telling you it does not do this, which is worth noticing because most still do. Museums add their own rule: the near-universal closing day is Monday, inherited from a state directive that has spread even to sites it never covered, so a Monday in a small town can mean the churches are open and everything else is not. Sundays are the reverse — open in the morning, closed in the afternoon — and the whole country slows for Ferragosto on 15 August. The compensation is that Italy gives a great deal away. The Domenica al Museo scheme makes state museums and archaeological sites free on the first Sunday of every month, which includes the Colosseum and the Uffizi and produces the queues you would expect. EU citizens aged 18 to 25 pay a reduced rate at state sites, and under-18s are usually free regardless of nationality; bring ID, because they check. Local tourist offices, the kind Alex is standing in, are labeled IAT or Pro Loco, are genuinely staffed by people who know the area, and hand out free maps that are better than the paid ones. Orvieto's own two sights are worth the visit: a striped Gothic cathedral facade that took three centuries, and the Pozzo di San Patrizio, a sixteenth-century well sunk sixty meters with two separate spiral ramps so that mules going down never met mules coming up.