There are things that can be done all year round but that become real nightmares during the Christmas holidays. Here are ten things not to do for Christmas in Italy (apart from drinking champagne).
Ten things not to do for Christmas in Italy
- Travel by train. If you think you can make any journey that from any point in the north goes to any point further south, even just a kilometer, you are wrong. There are people who book intercity in January to return from Milan to Bari.
- Go visit your aunt in Milan. If you think north-south direction is somehow better you are wrong. Reaching any point, including the aunt's house in Milan, will become like a video game in which you have to fight against infinite flows of cars and people. Stay home, it's better.
- Go for a walk downtown. Especially if you live outside the city or in the countryside, forget to go for a ride downtown. At each step you will meet an old grandmother's friend who wants to know what you have done in the past ten years. And then the parking in the center.
- Open facebook. If you have the good habit of not using social media, continue in this way. Between chain letters, pre-packaged greetings and messages from strangers who care very much 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.
- Make meetings in Rome. Needless to make meetings in Rome. Already since the first cold weather begins, if you set up any type of project, the response of your Roman interlocutor will be: “after Christmas we talk about it”.
6. Take a girl out for dinner. During the holidays there is a problem: restaurants are always full. People who never go out, during the holidays are always out for dinner. So if you take a girl out - if you find a place - it will end up meeting all those with whom you have gone out since high school. Better to proposed a tea. But at a time like three o'clock.
7. Go on a diet. If you really think of taking advantage of the holidays to get fit, you have not understood the essence of Italy: eating. Anyone you go to visit will offer you expansions of chocolate, riots of sweets of all kinds, which add to all the food they have given you. Better to wait for February.
8. Go to the gym. Probably for the guilt feelings related to binge eating, people who make annual gym passes, but that nobody has ever seen, crowd the gym. A great time to socialise. Impossible to train.
9. Go to the mountains. And do you think you can see the snow? If you try to put all the people who are in Cortina during the holidays in a row, you will leave from there and you will arrive in Ancona.
10. 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 are there. They say that Italians are no longer practicing religious. Maybe at Christmas they forget about it.
And these were ten things not to do for Christmas in Italy. Do you have others in mind?