Italian Dates

Italian dates look different from American dates and even from how you might expect a Romance language to handle them. The day comes before the month, the entire date sits behind a definite article, the months and weekdays are written in lowercase, and the year is pronounced as one giant compound number — il millenovecentonovantadue for 1992. Add to that the special status of the first of the month (an ordinal among cardinals) and the cultural shorthand for decades and centuries (gli anni Settanta, il Cinquecento), and you have a small system worth learning carefully.

This page walks through the format itself, the surrounding prepositions and articles, the spoken-form pitfalls, and the cultural conventions that surround dates in everyday Italian — birthdays, signed letters, decades, and centuries.

The basic format: il + day + month

The default Italian date is definite article + cardinal day + month, with the optional preposition di between the day and the month.

• 15 March → il quindici marzo or il quindici di marzo
• 8 December → l'otto dicembre or l'otto di dicembre
• 22 October → il ventidue ottobre
• 30 May → il trenta maggio

Both forms — with and without di — are equally correct. Spoken Italian leans slightly toward the shorter il quindici marzo; the di form (il quindici di marzo) feels marginally more careful or rhythmic. Choose either and don't worry about it.

The article is obligatory — you can't say quindici marzo on its own as a date. Il, l', or whatever form fits the day is part of the construction.

The first of the month: il primo

The exception you must memorise: the first day of any month uses the ordinal primo, not the cardinal uno.

• 1 January → il primo (di) gennaio — never l'uno gennaio
• 1 May → il primo (di) maggio — Italian Labour Day
• 1 November → il primo (di) novembre

This is the only place a Romance ordinal sneaks into a sequence that otherwise uses cardinals. Spanish does the same thing (el primero de enero); French and Portuguese share the pattern. It's a Romance-family habit, not an Italian quirk. From the second of the month onward, you're back to cardinals: il due, il tre, il quattro...

Months: lowercase, full year-round

Italian month names are never capitalised, even at the beginning of a written date in a heading. This rule is rigid in modern Italian — capitalising a month inside a sentence is wrong, capitalising it in a date line is wrong, and only sentence-initial capitalisation (Gennaio è un mese freddo) follows the normal rules of orthography.

Months are masculine: un gennaio freddo, l'agosto del 1944, il settembre scorso.

Days of the week: also lowercase

The seven Italian weekday names are likewise lowercase, masculine (except Sunday), and historically transparent — six of the seven end in -dì, from Latin dies ("day"), with the planet (Mars, Mercury, Jupiter...) prefixed. Sabato and domenica break the pattern: sabato is from the Hebrew shabbat, domenica from the Latin dies dominica ("the Lord's day").

When you combine a weekday with a date, the order is weekday + date, no comma needed:

For the role of the article with weekdays (il lunedì "on Mondays" vs lunedì "on Monday"), see articles with dates and days.

Years: a single, very long compound number

Italian reads a year as one word — a compound cardinal number with no spaces, no hyphens, no commas. The article il (or l' before a vowel) is obligatory.

• 1492 → il millequattrocentonovantadue
• 1789 → il millesettecentottantanove
• 1861 → il milleottocentosessantuno
• 1900 → il millenovecento
• 1992 → il millenovecentonovantadue
• 2000 → il duemila
• 2024 → il duemilaventiquattro

Yes, native speakers really pronounce the year as one mouthful — though in fast speech it sounds smoothed-out, and the boundaries between mille, cento, and the tens are easy to hear once you're tuned in.

In writing, the digits are normal (1968, 2024); only when you spell the year out — in a literary text, a poem, or for stylistic effect — do you write the compound form.

Prepositions with dates: in, nel, del

Years and dates take different prepositions depending on the phrase you're building.

In + the year, contracted to nel. To say "in 1968" or "in 2024," Italian contracts in + il to nel, the standard articulated preposition. You'll see nel + year almost universally.

Of + the year, contracted to del. To say "of 1968" — modifying a noun — Italian uses del (di + il).

On + a specific date — no preposition. To say "on March 15th," you do not use a preposition. The article alone (il quindici marzo) does the work English needs on for. Spanish speakers who are tempted to insert en (en el quince de marzo) are wrong in their own language too — el quince de marzo is the Spanish form. Italian behaves the same way: bare il quindici marzo, no in.

The exception: when you say "the X-th was a..." or "starting from the X-th," the prepositions del, dal, al attach normally.

The full written date format

A formal Italian date — letter heading, official document, contract — looks like this:

Roma, 1 gennaio 2024

Note the conventions:

• The city comes first, followed by a comma.
• The day is written as a simple digit (1, not primo) — but read aloud as the ordinal: Roma, primo gennaio duemilaventiquattro.
• The month is lowercase.
• The year follows directly, without a comma between month and year.
• No "il" in this heading style — the article is dropped because the format is telegraphic, parallel to a stamp or a receipt.

In running prose, restore the article and any prepositions:

Numeric date format: 15/3/2024 or 15-03-2024

Italian uses the DD/MM/YYYY order, the European standard — opposite to the American MM/DD/YYYY. This is one of the most common practical confusions for North Americans living in Italy.

• 15/3/2024 = il quindici marzo duemilaventiquattro (March 15)
• 3/12/2024 = il tre dicembre duemilaventiquattro (December 3, not March 12)
• 1/1/2025 = il primo gennaio duemilaventicinque

Separators vary: 15/3/2024, 15-03-2024, 15.03.2024 are all acceptable. The day and month are usually written without leading zeros in informal contexts (15/3/2024) and with leading zeros in formal contexts (15/03/2024).

Centuries by the hundreds: il Cinquecento, il Novecento

Italian has a beautiful cultural shorthand for centuries from the 1200s to the 1900s: drop "century," name the period after its hundreds, and capitalise it.

These short forms are obligatory in art history, literature, and cultural writing. La pittura del Quattrocento sounds natural; la pittura del quindicesimo secolo sounds like a translated textbook.

The 21st century has no widely-used short form (il Duemila exists but refers more to "the year/era 2000" than a clean century label). Use il ventunesimo secolo for "the 21st century."

For ordinal-based forms (il ventesimo secolo) and the system behind them, see ordinals.

Decades: gli anni Settanta

Italian names decades with the formula gli anni + capitalised tens-word.

• gli anni Venti — the 1920s
• gli anni Trenta — the 1930s
• gli anni Quaranta — the 1940s
• gli anni Cinquanta — the 1950s
• gli anni Sessanta — the 1960s
• gli anni Settanta — the 1970s
• gli anni Ottanta — the 1980s
• gli anni Novanta — the 1990s

The capitalised Settanta, Ottanta, Novanta are the giveaway — Italian otherwise lowercases these numbers, but in this fixed phrase they take a capital. The 2000s and 2010s require a circumlocution: i primi anni Duemila, gli anni Dieci del Duemila, etc.

Common Mistakes

Key takeaways

1. The default Italian date is il + cardinal day + (di) + month: il quindici marzo. The article is obligatory; the di is optional.

2. The first of the month is the ordinal primo: il primo gennaio. Every other day uses a cardinal.

3. Months and weekdays are lowercase. The grave accent on lunedì, martedì, etc. is part of the spelling.

4. Years are pronounced as one compound number: il millenovecentonovantadue for 1992. Use nel for "in" + year, del for "of" + year, and no preposition for "on" + a specific date.

5. The numeric format is DD/MM/YYYY — opposite to the American convention.

6. Centuries from the 1200s through the 1900s use capitalised short forms (il Trecento, il Novecento), and decades use gli anni + capitalised tens (gli anni Settanta).

For the underlying number forms, see cardinals 100+ and ordinals. For the article rules behind il + day, see articles with dates and days. For more on time expressions, see time expressions.