Italian Months: Complete Guide to Months of the Year and Seasons in Italian

Months in Italian is one of those fundamental building blocks you'll need whether you're planning a trip to Italy, studying the language seriously, or just trying to understand when that Italian film festival is happening.📽️ The good news? Italian month names are pretty straightforward, especially if you've studied any other Romance language. They share Latin roots with English months, so you'll spot some familiar patterns right away.

The 12 months of the year in Italian and English

Let me just give you the complete list with Italian pronunciation first, because that's probably what you came here for:

Pretty cool how similar some of these look to English, right? Settembre, ottobre, novembre, and dicembre are almost identical. That makes memorization way easier than you'd think.

Grammar rules for using the months in Italian

Capitalization of the month in Italian

This might surprise you if you're coming from English: months in Italian aren't capitalized. Yep, you write "gennaio" not "Gennaio" unless it's at the start of a sentence. Same goes for days of the week, actually. Italian reserves capital letters for proper names of people, cities, and countries, but not for months or weekdays.

Gender of the months

Are Italian month names masculine or feminine? They're all masculine. Every single month in Italian takes masculine articles: il gennaio, il febbraio, il marzo, and so on. Though honestly, you won't use the article with months that often.

When you want to say something happens "in" a particular month, you use the preposition "a" (which contracts to "ad" before a vowel) or just "in." So "in January" becomes "a gennaio" or "in gennaio." Both work, though "a" is more common in spoken Italian.

If you want to say "all the months," that's "tutti i mesi" in Italian. The word for month is "mese" (Singular) or "mesi" (Plural).

Common abbreviations for Italian months

Italians abbreviate months pretty much the way you'd expect. They typically use the first three letters:

You'll see these abbreviations on calendars, forms, and schedules throughout Italy.

Months and seasons in Italian

Understanding which months fall into which season helps you talk about time periods more naturally. Here's how the Italian calendar breaks down:

Cultural events tied to specific months

Each month in Italian culture has its own character and associated events.

How to use months in sentences

When you're talking about when something happens, you'll typically structure it like this:

Notice you don't need the article "il" before the month when using it with a preposition. You just say "a gennaio" not "al gennaio."

If you want to say "next month" or "last month," those are "il mese prossimo" and "il mese scorso." For "this month," say "questo mese."

The year in italian is "anno," so "this year" is "quest'anno" and you'd say something like "Quest'anno vado in Italia ad agosto" (This year I'm going to Italy in August).

How to learn the months in Italian without wasting time

Here's what actually works:

Anyway, if you want to learn Italian through actual content you enjoy, Migaku's browser extension and app let you look up words instantly while watching Italian shows or reading articles. You can save words like these month names directly from context, which makes them way easier to remember. There's a 10-day free trial if you want to check it out.

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Should I learn Italian calendar vocabulary?

Using a calendar in Italian language is a good choice to create immersion at home! Moreover, as to other immersion methods, when you're watching an Italian show and someone says "Ci vediamo a dicembre," you're not just memorizing a vocabulary word. You're absorbing how Italians actually use these terms in real life.

New month, new beginning!