Buongiorno! Buonasera! Buonanotte!

Buongiorno! Buonasera! Buonanotte!

Good day! Good evening! Good night!

Time takes different names in Italian. If you want to know the time of day, you ask, “Che ore sono?” (Literally, what are the hours?) If you worry "all the time," you use “il tempo” as in “tutto il tempo.” (Il tempo also means weather so some people may be worrying about il tempo tutto il tempo.) If you do something one time, you say “una volta”; twice, “due volte”, if you do it all at once, it’s “tutto in una volta.” These points of distinction I accept. After all, Italian’s roots date back almost 3,000 years, far too much time for any single word to transmit.

Yet after dozens of trips to Italy, one question continued to confound me: at what hour of the day do you stop saying “buongiorno” (good day) and start using “buonasera” (good evening) or “buonanotte” (good night). In Florence, if I uttered “buongiorno” a minute after noon, people would often respond with “buonasera.” In Rome I kept hearing “buongiorno” well into the afternoon.

I ventured an occasional “buon pomeriggio!” (good afternoon!) but rarely heard an Italian use this greeting. I discovered why in a scholarly linguistic analysis of modern Italian.* Long divided into separate (and often warring) city-states, Italy evolved as a mosaic of regional dialects, each with distinctive sounds, structures and vocabulary. In some places, including Tuscany, the birthplace of Italian, citizens progressed through centuries of days without a pomeriggio (or any other word for afternoon). La mattina (morning) simply blended into la sera (evening) at some unspecified point after midday.

For further clarification I turned to a highly qualified authority: Valeria della Valle, a professor of Italian at Rome’s La Sapienza University and author of both scholarly texts and popular best-sellers on the language. La Professoressa offers this rule of thumb: il buongiorno until lunchtime (likely to be later in Rome than northern cities), la buonasera afterward.

As for buonanotte, save it for your final farewell before heading to bed. And if you want to ensure sogni d’oro (golden dreams), listen to “Buonanotte, buonanotte,” a contemporary ninna nanna (lullaby) sung by the Italian pop legend Mina.



Sayings and Expressions:

Il buon giorno si vede dal mattino -- You can tell by the morning if it’s going to be a good day.

Buonanotte al secchio! -- Literally good night to the bucket, an idiomatic way of dismissing a topic

Buonasera! -- If injected into the middle of a conversation, “good evening” serves as an ironic way of signaling the end of a task or discussion—or of the impossibility of ever sorting out a thorny problem.

*Tosi, Arturo. Language and Society in a Changing Italy. Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters, 2001, p. 44.