Working With Italian Colleagues: Scheduling Around Lunch Breaks and August Holidays

A colleague in Milan proposes a call at 13:00 your time. You accept, because 13:00 is a normal hour to be working. The invitation then sits unanswered until the following morning, and the follow-up email you send lands in a silent inbox. Nothing has gone wrong. You have simply booked a meeting in the middle of lunch.

Working with Italian teams is not difficult, but it runs on a different clock. Two things catch people out again and again: the long midday break, and the way the country slows to a crawl in August. Neither is a secret, and neither is unreasonable. Both need to be built into your calendar rather than treated as obstacles to route around. What follows is how to plan meetings, deadlines and follow-ups so the rhythm works for you instead of against you.

The Shape of an Italian Working Day

Most offices open between 8:30 and 9:30, and the morning is the most productive block of the day. Decisions get made before lunch because everyone knows the afternoon will be broken up and the day will end later than it does in, say, London or Berlin. Lunch usually falls between 12:30 and 14:30. In northern cities and in larger companies it is often a tight hour; in smaller firms, family businesses and much of the south it can stretch longer, sometimes with a proper sit-down meal.

The afternoon resumes around 14:30 and runs until 18:00 or later. Many people stay at their desks well past six, so a 17:30 call is not unreasonable in itself, though it competes with school pick-ups and commutes. Remote and hybrid work has blurred the edges of this pattern, but the lunch block has survived more or less intact. It is when people go home, eat with family, run errands or see friends. Treat it as fixed infrastructure.

Why the Midday Break Is Not a Gap to Fill

A 13:00 meeting request is not fatal, but it sends a signal: that you have not looked at how your counterpart's day is structured, or that you expect them to rearrange it. Some will accept to be polite and then spend the hour distracted or eating at their desk. You will get a decision eventually, but you will have spent goodwill on something a two-line email could have avoided.

The simplest fix is to ask. "Would 11:00 work, or do you prefer after 14:30?" takes one line and tells your colleague you have noticed. If someone proposes a lunchtime slot themselves, take it — they know their own diary. Just do not be the one to propose it.

Where to Put Meetings in the Week

Mornings: 9:00 to 11:30

This is the slot for anything that needs a real decision, a negotiation, or a room full of people paying attention. Book it a few days ahead and send an agenda the afternoon before, in their time zone, so it is waiting when the morning starts. Monday mornings usually go to internal catch-ups and planning, so Tuesday to Thursday is safer for cross-border calls.

Afternoons: 14:30 to 16:30

Good for reviews, walkthroughs and anything collaborative where a slow start does not matter. After 16:30 attention tends to thin, and after 17:30 you are competing with the end of the day. Friday afternoon is best avoided for anything requiring a signature or a firm commitment; the answer you get may not survive the weekend.

• Offer two options, both clear of 12:30–14:30.
• State times in the recipient's time zone, not yours.
• Never book a recurring series straight across the lunch hour.
• Confirm sensitive deadlines by chat or phone, not by calendar invitation alone.
• Leave a fifteen-minute buffer after lunch before expecting anyone to be sharp.

August: Plan for It in June

Ferragosto falls on 15 August, and the weeks around it are when Italy takes its holidays. Manufacturing companies often close entirely for two or three weeks; offices may stay open with a skeleton staff while half the team is away. Even where the office is open, the people who approve budgets, sign contracts or make the final call are frequently not at their desks.

The practical consequence: July and August are poor months for pushing new decisions through, and the last week of August is not the moment to expect a fresh start. Work that needs sign-off should be agreed before the third week of July. Anything unresolved by then should be scheduled for the second week of September, with the expectation that the first days back are spent clearing email rather than making choices.

Two habits help. First, ask early: "Who covers for you while you are away, and who signs off if something needs a decision?" Second, put the August plan in writing — which milestones move before the break, which wait until September, and who is reachable in between. A short document circulated in June saves a dozen anxious emails in August.

Not everyone disappears, incidentally. Some people stay and enjoy the quiet office, and they can be surprisingly responsive. Send the question, but do not read silence as refusal.

Deadlines That Survive the Calendar

"End of August" is not a deadline. It could mean 28 August, 31 August or the first Monday in September, and everyone on the thread will interpret it differently. Use exact dates, and count the actual working days between now and then. A task that looks like it has six weeks may only have twenty-two working days once weekends, holidays and two public holidays are removed.

Take a concrete case. A document needs review, a signature and a translation before release. If you target 14 August, you are asking three people to act in the week when at least one of them is on a beach. Set the internal deadline for 25 July, book the review call in the first week of July, and set the release date for 8 September. It feels slow. It nearly always finishes on time.

The same logic applies to individual weeks: avoid Friday-afternoon requests, avoid the day before a public holiday, and allow at least two working days for anything that needs a considered reply. December has its own cluster of closures around 8 December and the Christmas period, so plan that month with the same caution.

Keeping Momentum Without Pushing

When a team is slow to respond, the instinct is to send more. It rarely works. A single weekly summary listing what is waiting, what has moved and what you need next tends to be more effective than five separate chasers, and it gives the person returning from holiday one place to look. Use chat for quick questions and email for anything that needs a record.

Respecting the lunch break and the August slowdown is not indulgence; it is how you build the kind of trust that makes people answer your messages first. Teams that feel their calendar is understood tend to bend it when you genuinely need them to.

A Short Checklist Before You Book Anything

1. Check the local time and keep 12:30–14:30 free.
2. Offer a morning slot for decisions and an afternoon slot for reviews.
3. Send the agenda the day before, in their time zone.
4. For anything spanning July and September, fix exact dates before the end of June.
5. Ask who deputises during August, and write the answer down.
6. Schedule the first September review for the second week, not the first day back.

None of this requires you to slow down. It requires you to look at the calendar the way your Italian colleagues see it, and then plan around what you find. Do that, and the meetings get shorter, the replies get faster, and nobody spends their lunch hour on a call.

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