New Year's Eve in Italy

Venice, Florence, Cortina — a curated guide to the closing night of the year, for clients who have asked us where in Italy is the right place to spend it.

We are asked, in late September each year, by perhaps a dozen of our most established clients, the same question: where in Italy is the right place to spend New Year's Eve. The question is more interesting than it first appears, because the Italian Capodanno is not, in any meaningful sense, a single tradition. It is a series of regional traditions, each with a quite different character, and the right answer for one client is rarely the right answer for another. This piece is the answer we give in those late-September conversations, expanded somewhat for the page.

Venice: The Theatrical Capodanno

Venice's New Year's Eve is the most theatrical of the major Italian options. The city's tradition centres on the Piazza San Marco, where a free public concert is held on the evening of the thirty-first, followed at midnight by the major fireworks display over the lagoon. The fireworks themselves are technically launched from rafts in the Bacino di San Marco, the lagoon basin in front of the piazza, and the spectacle — with the reflection of the fireworks on the water and the silhouettes of the campanile and the Doge's Palace against the sky — is, by general acknowledgement, among the most photographed midnights in Europe.

The crowd in the piazza for the public event is enormous and, for our clients, is generally not the right answer. The right answer is a private window or a private terrace overlooking the Bacino. The major hotels along the Grand Canal — the Aman Venice, the Gritti Palace, the Bauer — offer private dinners and viewing arrangements for their guests, with the windows of the suites facing the lagoon turning into private grandstands for the fireworks. We book these, for clients with serious interest in the Venetian Capodanno, twelve to eighteen months in advance. The headline suites are typically committed by April of the year before.

Florence: The Quieter Capodanno

Florence's New Year's Eve is the quieter and more domestic of the major options. The city has, traditionally, been less of a public-celebration city than Venice or Rome, and the Florentine Capodanno has been historically a home affair — large family dinners, the cotechino and lentils at midnight (the lentils representing the coins of the new year), the fireworks watched from terraces and balconies rather than from a major piazza.

We arrange Florence New Year's Eve packages around a similar logic. A long dinner at one of the city's major restaurants — Cibrèo, La Bottega del Buon Caffè, Enoteca Pinchiorri for the most ceremonial option — followed by a midnight viewing of the fireworks from the Piazzale Michelangelo or from a private terrace at one of the hill hotels (the Villa San Michele, the Belmond hotel above Fiesole, has perhaps the best private viewing position in the city). The Florentine Capodanno is, for many of our clients, the more elegant of the major Italian alternatives, precisely because the city has not commercialised the night to the extent that Venice and Rome have.

Cortina: The Alpine Capodanno

Cortina d'Ampezzo's New Year's Eve is, by our reading, the most distinctive of the major Italian options, and the one we recommend most often to families and to clients who have done the city Capodanni before. The Cortina tradition is built around the torchlit ski parade — the Fiaccolata — in which the local ski instructors descend the Tofana piste in formation with red flares, a spectacle that, watched from the centre of the town with the snow falling around the spectators, is among the more memorable winter scenes the European year produces.

The midnight itself is celebrated in the major hotels — the Cristallo, the Rosapetra, the Faloria — with formal galas and the traditional Italian cotechino-and-lentils dinner. The post-midnight scene is largely on the dance floors of the hotels and at the small clubs around the town, but for our clients the more memorable element is the New Year's Day morning ski — the slopes are essentially empty until late morning while the rest of the town recovers — and the long lunch on the mountain that follows.

Choosing Between Them

We recommend Venice to clients who want the most photographically remarkable midnight and who have not done a Venetian winter visit before. We recommend Florence to clients who want the most elegant urban Capodanno and who appreciate the more domestic character of the Florentine tradition. We recommend Cortina to families, to clients who ski, and to clients who simply prefer a mountain New Year's Eve to a city one. Each of the three answers is the right answer for a particular kind of client.

We will mention, in closing, two smaller and more individual options that we have arranged for clients with specific tastes. A New Year's Eve at the Borgo Egnazia in Puglia, with its considerable production for the holiday that includes a major dinner, a tarantella performance, and fireworks over the masseria — for clients who want the southern version. And a New Year's Eve at one of the smaller country villas we manage in Tuscany, taken with private staff and a chef, for an entirely private celebration of perhaps eight or ten guests. The villa option, in particular, has become more popular in recent years as our most experienced clients have moved away from the public events toward the more intimate ones.

The midnight in a private dining room with the closest friends, a glass of something serious, and the lentils on the table, is for many of our clients the considered answer to the New Year's Eve question, and it is the answer they return to year after year.

Inquiry