North Americans who move to Italy, like me and my wife did more than eight years ago, must learn an important lesson quickly if they are going to avoid frustration.

The lesson is this: in Italy there are two ways to measure time – real time and Italian time.

Real time is the one most people in the world know. In real time, a minute has sixty seconds, an hour has sixty minutes, and a week has seven days. It’s simple.

In Italian time, half an hour is 53 to 71 real time minutes. An hour in Italian time is closer to two hours in real time. Five minutes and 10 minutes in Italian time are both half an hour in real time. So, when somebody says “I’ll see you in two hours,” it’s going to be closer to four hours. If somebody says a project will take a week, think about two weeks. It’s not simple.

In Northern Italy, real time is the default. In Southern Italy, Italian time is standard.

We are in the Abruzzo region, which is geographically in about the center of the country, but politically, socially, culturally, economically, and, yes, temporally, we are in the south.

Over the years, I’ve become quite adept at Italian time, but sometimes I forget.

Take our current project transforming an old, slightly neglected Baron’s Estate into our second all-inclusive tour location. We needed to build a few walls to properly separate rooms, install four ensuite bathrooms, get the place properly air conditioned, and install a professional kitchen among other things.

Last September our contractor told us it would take about six weeks to complete the interior works. Without even thinking about it, my brain automatically transposed those six weeks into roughly three months.

No problem. We would have plenty of time to get things ready for our target opening date of April 6.

At that time, we were in negotiations on a rent to own contract for the Estate. The main aspects of the contract were already verbally agreed. So I figured we would sign the papers in a couple weeks and then be off to the races. I was told the contract would be done by October at the latest.

That left plenty of time, but I forgot that “I’ll get back to you in a couple days” was really “I’ll get back to you in a week or so.”

The back and forthing was also complicated by language issues. Worse, there was the fact that I was dealing with four owners on the title of the Estate, all of whom had to agree on everything. And anyone who’s spent 10 seconds around Italians knows that getting four of them to agree on anything is almost impossible. This includes agreeing on things like the color of the sky or that the Pope is Catholic.

By December, I was getting pretty nervous. We weren’t going to start the work without a contract, but we were running out of time. If the contract wasn’t signed in the next two weeks, the 12 days of Christmas break, which starts about December 8 and goes to mid-January, would kick in and our start date would have to be pushed back. Not good.

That’s when our very persistent lawyer lit a fire under the other side. She’s not threatening or anything like that, but she’ll phone somebody 15 times in a day when she wants something done. It’s so annoying, you do whatever she wants asap just to make her stop. It’s a great antidote to situations suffering acutely from Italian time syndrome.

Suddenly, “I’ll get back to you tomorrow” was only two days instead of five. My main contact from the Baron’s family literally asked me to ask her to stop harassing him. I said I would but I doubted she would. She didn’t, thank God, and by mid-December, the contract was signed.

The morning it was signed, the building permit was issued and the works began before the ink was dry.

As it turns out, I got Italian time right on the time estimate for the project. Six weeks is now 2 ½ months, and we are still a couple weeks away from the project’s end. We are now entering the-get-stuff-into-the-rooms phase: new beds, side tables, armoires, chairs, lamps etc. etc. and you can see the character of the rooms coming out.

I took a quick tour of the Estate’s main building yesterday. It’s looking good. There’s still a lot to do, but we are going to get it done well in advance of our first arrivals.

Still, just imagine if I’d actually trusted the six-week estimate. I’d be contacting people who had booked for April telling them we wouldn’t be ready. I’d try to rebook them, but I’d have to refund their deposits if they insisted. I know I’d be angry if somebody screwed up my holiday. Yikes. Just thinking about it makes me queasy.

Anyway, that’s not happening, and it’s thanks to my understanding of Italian time.

So, look for my next blog post in a couple days, which will be exactly one week from today.

In early December, I realized I’d massively misjudged Italian time’s impact on contract negotiations. I forgot that a week of Italian time is really 17 1/2 days of real time. Shit.

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Italian Time