Merry Christmas in Italian: Buon Natale

Merry Christmas in Italian is Buon Natale!, said "bwon nah-TAH-leh", and it is the greeting you will hear from Milan to Palermo. Buon is "good" and Natale is "Christmas", from the Latin for "birth", so Italians wish you a good Christmas rather than a merry one. The other everyday wish is simply Auguri!, "best wishes". Below are Christmas wishes in Italian ready to copy into a card, for family, friends and work; then why it is buon and not buono, the other ways to say it, the words of the season from the Vigilia to the Befana, the carols, and how often Italian film and television subtitles say them.

Updated 28 October 2026 · 16 min read

Christmas wishes in Italian, ready to copy

Italian has three ways of saying "you" in a wish: ti to one person you call tu, vi to several people, and Le to one person you call Lei, the polite form. Family and friends get tu and voi; a client, a manager you do not call tu, or anyone you would address formally, gets Lei.

For family

For friends

Che followed by the subjunctive is how Italian makes a wish: che … ti porti is "may it bring you".

For colleagues and clients, with Lei

Le auguro is "I wish you" to one person you call Lei; with tu the same wish is ti auguro, and to several people vi auguro. Choosing between them is covered, with counts, in formal and informal you.

Religious wishes

Signing off

• Un abbraccio: "a hug".
• Un abbraccio forte: "a big hug".
• Baci: "kisses", for family and close friends.
• Con affetto: "with love".
• Cordiali saluti: "kind regards", for work.

Buon Natale, word by word

• Buon is buono, "good", from Latin bonus, in its shortened form (more on that below). The Treccani dictionary gives buon Natale, buona Pasqua and buon Capodanno as its examples of wishes.
• Natale is from Latin natalis, "to do with birth", from natus, "born". Treccani’s own first example under the word is Buon Natale a tutti!, "Merry Christmas, everyone!" Wiktionary traces the festival’s name to natalis dies Domini, "the birthday of the Lord".

Buon Natale is therefore "good birthday", the birthday being Christ’s. Saying it: bwon nah-TAH-leh (IPA /ˈbwɔn naˈta.le/), with the stress on -TA-. The uo of buon is one quick syllable, not two, and the final -e of Natale is a clear "eh", never silent.

Why buon, not buono?

Before a noun, buono loses its last vowel. Treccani gives the rule: in front of a noun it is cut to buon before a vowel, and before a consonant followed by a vowel, an l or an r. Natale begins with n and a vowel, so it is buon Natale; anno begins with a vowel, so it is buon anno. The same happens in buongiorno, "good day", written as one word.

Three details follow from the rule:

• No apostrophe. Cutting off a vowel this way is a troncamento, and Treccani’s grammar says a troncamento takes no apostrophe, so it is buon anno, never buon’anno.
• The feminine and plural do not shorten. It is buona Pasqua, "happy Easter", and buone feste, "happy holidays".
• Before s and another consonant, buono stays whole, because the rule only covers a consonant followed by a vowel, l or r: un buono studente, "a good student".

A capital N

Natale takes a capital. Treccani lists it with a capital when it means the day of Christ’s birth, 25 December, and in lower case when it is the ordinary adjective: la terra natale is "your native land", il giorno natale "your birthday". In a card, Buon takes a capital only because it opens the sentence: Ti auguro buon Natale. Wiktionary adds a third sense: Natale is also a man’s name.

Other ways to say Merry Christmas in Italian

Four notes on the table:

• Auguri is always plural. Treccani says Italians exchange gli auguri, "always in the plural", at the big festivals and on birthdays and weddings; its examples include auguri di buon Natale and tanti auguri agli sposi!, "best wishes to the bride and groom!". Fare gli auguri is "to wish someone well" for an occasion: Ti chiamo per farti gli auguri is "I’m calling to wish you a happy Christmas" (or birthday, or whatever the day is).
• Buone feste is in the dictionary as a seasonal wish. Treccani records buone feste! for Christmas and Easter, and le feste as the big festivals; sotto le feste is "in the run-up to the holidays".
• Felice Natale is correct but less common, according to Treccani. It does not discuss felice Natale directly, but under felice it says that wishes made with it, such as felice notte and felice viaggio, are less common than the same wishes made with buono. The film counts below cannot settle it: they are single words, and felice is every "happy" in the language.
• Felice anno nuovo is the form in the set phrase Wiktionary records for the card line: buon Natale e felice anno nuovo.

The words of the Christmas season

La Vigilia and the cenone

Vigilia is the eve of any religious feast, and Treccani notes that the word also meant the penance kept on those days: fasting, or mangiare di magro, eating no meat. The cenone, literally "big dinner", is Treccani’s word for a lavish dinner with many guests, "in particular" the one held on Christmas Eve or on the last night of the year.

The Feast of the Seven Fishes is the name the dinner goes by in the United States, and how Italian it is depends on what you ask. Wikipedia describes it as an Italian-American celebration of Christmas Eve, and says it is unclear when or where the English name caught on; the oldest newspaper use it cites is in the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1983. It also says the claim that the custom is "unknown in Italy" is wrong: a Christmas Eve meal of seven or thirteen fishes is well documented in Calabria. So the dinner has documented roots in southern Italy, while the English name is the part whose history the sources follow in America.

The presepe

Italians set up a nativity scene, il presepe or il presepio. Both forms are correct: Treccani gives them as one word, from Latin praesepe, "a manger, an enclosure". The custom is traced to Francis of Assisi, whose manger scene is said to have been staged at Christmas 1223 in a cave near Greccio; his biographer Saint Bonaventure wrote it down about 1260. Naples has made the craft its own, and its Via San Gregorio Armeno, "the street of the nativity scenes", is lined with workshops selling hand-made figures.

Babbo Natale and the Befana

Italy’s Father Christmas is Babbo Natale, and babbo is Treccani’s affectionate word for "dad", "especially common in Tuscany".

The older gift-bringer is la Befana. Her name comes from Epifania, Epiphany (Latin epiphania), and Treccani describes her as an old woman, "very ugly but kind", who comes down the chimney on the night of 5 to 6 January and leaves presents and sweets for good children. Naughty ones get carbone, coal. The best-known rhyme about her is anonymous and traditional, and its first line is the one everyone knows: La Befana vien di notte, con le scarpe tutte rotte, "the Befana comes at night, with her shoes all worn out". Her night is the end of the holidays, and the proverb says so: L’Epifania tutte le feste porta via, "Epiphany carries all the holidays away".

Santo Stefano

The day after Christmas, 26 December, is Santo Stefano, and it is a national public holiday in Italy. According to Wikipedia it became one in 1947, and not for religious reasons: the Church does not require it, and the aim was to make Christmas two days long, as Easter is with Easter Monday. Italian has a saying built on how close the two days are: something that dura da Natale a santo Stefano, "lasts from Christmas to St Stephen’s", Treccani glosses as something that lasts a very short time.

And a second saying, about where to spend each festival: Natale con i tuoi e Pasqua con chi vuoi, "Christmas with your family, Easter with whoever you like". It is in Treccani under Natale.

Panettone or pandoro

The two Christmas cakes of Italy each have a home city:

• Panettone is, in Treccani’s words, "a typical Milanese sweet, dome-shaped", made with citron and sultanas; the name is the Milanese panattón, from pane, "bread". Treccani mentions the legend that sets its invention at the Visconti court in fourteenth-century Milan, and adds that it is probably older.
• Pandoro is "a traditional Veronese sweet", soft and light, with a tall shape whose ridges make an eight-pointed star. Its name is pan d’oro, "golden bread".

Both, Treccani says, are now eaten as Christmas cakes all over Italy.

Tombola and the zampognari

La tombola is Italy’s Christmas number game: ninety numbers, cards of fifteen, and prizes for two numbers in a row (ambo), three (terno), four (quaterna), five (cinquina) and a full card (tombola). Its origin story is Neapolitan, and Italian Wikipedia is careful to call it tradition: in 1734, the story goes, King Charles of Bourbon and the friar Gregorio Maria Rocco disagreed over the public lottery, which was suspended over Christmas, and families played their own version at home. The game goes with la smorfia, which gives each of the ninety numbers a meaning, often a comic one.

The zampognari are players of the zampogna, a shepherds’ bagpipe of a leather bag and wooden pipes. Treccani’s entry for the instrument says that at Christmas, in the past, shepherds from Abruzzo went round the cities playing it, and its example for zampognaro has two of them playing in front of a nativity scene.

Where it comes from

Italian Christmas varies by region, and the sources above tie several customs to a particular place:

Everything else in this post, from Buon Natale to the Befana, is shared by the whole country.

The carols: Tu scendi dalle stelle and Astro del ciel

The best-known Italian carol is Tu scendi dalle stelle, "You come down from the stars", by Saint Alphonsus Maria de’ Liguori. When and where he wrote it has been argued over:

• A book of 1857 placed it in Nola, during one of his missions.
• Italian Wikipedia now dates it to the convent of the Consolation at Deliceto, in the province of Foggia, begun in December 1744 and finished in 1747, and says recent work on the manuscripts showed that the Nola visit took place in 1759, after the song had already been printed. English Wikipedia gives Deliceto too, with 1744 in one place and 1732 in another.
• What is not in doubt is the first printing: as Canzoncina a Gesù Bambino, in Naples in 1755.

He reworked it from a Neapolitan carol of his own, Quanno nascette Ninno, "When the Child was born", and English Wikipedia notes that the tune comes from the music of the zampogna. The words are long out of copyright, and the first lines run:

Astro del ciel is the Italian Silent Night, and it is not a translation. Its words are an original text written to Gruber’s tune by Angelo Meli, a priest from Bergamo, and published by Edizioni Carrara of Bergamo in 1937. Meli died in 1970, and in the European Union a text stays in copyright for seventy years after its author’s death, so the words are protected until the end of 2040 and we do not print them here. The German original, which is in the public domain, is on Merry Christmas in German.

How often do Italian films say them?

We counted the words of the season in Italian film and television subtitles, about 247 million words of dialogue.

Each figure is how many times the word is said per million words. These are single words, so every count includes whatever else the word means, which is what the last column is for.

What the counts show:

• Natale is said 121.4 times per million words, the same figure as on the nine-language page, because both count it the same way; it includes the adjective of città natale and the name.
• Christmas outweighs the New Year. Natale is said 19.1 times as often as Capodanno.
• Presepe is the form people say. Both are correct, but presepe turns up 137 times against 15 for presepio, 9.1 times as often.
• Panettone beats pandoro, 4.1 times as often, though both are rare in dialogue: pandoro is said 17 times in all those millions of words.
• Auguri is everywhere, at 28.8 per million, because it is also every birthday and every wedding.
• The zampognari have almost vanished from the screen. The singular and plural together turn up seventeen times.

Two cautions. Babbo counts every Tuscan "dad" as well as Father Christmas, and vigilia every eve, so neither is a measure of the season. And most of these subtitles are translations of English-language films and series: this is what translators chose for American Christmas films, which is one reason panettone and the zampognari barely appear.

Learn the language behind the greeting

Buon Natale is two words and one grammar rule. Verbavia teaches Italian from the most common words up, a lesson a day, free on the web.

The everyday greetings, from ciao to buonasera, are in greetings in Italian. The same Christmas greeting in eight other languages is in Merry Christmas and Happy New Year in 9 languages, and the card wishes of two other languages are in Merry Christmas in Spanish and Merry Christmas in Chinese.

Merry Christmas has its own page in French and Portuguese too.

Sources

• Treccani, Vocabolario on line: buono (from Latin bonus; shortened to buon before a vowel and before a consonant followed by a vowel, l or r; buon Natale, buona Pasqua, buon Capodanno), natale (from Latin natalis; the capital for 25 December; Buon Natale a tutti!; Natale con i tuoi e Pasqua con chi vuoi; durare da Natale a santo Stefano), augurio (auguri, always plural; tanti auguri; fare gli auguri), felice (wishes with felice less common than with buono), festa (buone feste!, sotto le feste), Capodanno, vigilia, cenone, messa (messa di mezzanotte), presepio, babbo, befana, epifania, panettone, pandoro, torrone, tombola (a tumble), zampogna and zampognaro.
• Treccani, La grammatica italiana: troncamento/) (compulsory with buono before a consonant; no apostrophe).
• Wiktionary: buon Natale (pronunciation; buon Natale e felice anno nuovo), Natale (natalis dies Domini; the given name) and auguri (pronunciation; tanti auguri).
• Wikipedia: Feast of the Seven Fishes (Italian-American; Calabria; the Philadelphia Inquirer, 1983), Nativity scene (Greccio, 1223; Bonaventure; Via San Gregorio Armeno), Saint Stephen’s Day and Public holidays in Italy (a public holiday since 1947, and why), Tu scendi dalle stelle (Deliceto; the zampogna tune), and in Italian, Tu scendi dalle stelle (Deliceto 1744–1747, the Nola account, the 1755 printing, Quanno nascette Ninno, the text), Astro del ciel (Angelo Meli, 1901–1970; Edizioni Carrara, 1937), Befana (the traditional rhyme; the night of 5 to 6 January; the proverb) and Tombola (the 1734 tradition; the prizes; la smorfia).
• Directive 2006/116/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council on the term of protection of copyright, articles 1 and 8 (seventy years after the author’s death, counted from the following 1 January). eur-lex.europa.eu
• Lison, P. & Tiedemann, J. (2016). OpenSubtitles2016: Extracting Large Parallel Corpora from Movie and TV Subtitles. Proceedings of LREC 2016. aclanthology.org
• Dave, H. FrequencyWords: frequency lists from OpenSubtitles 2018, content licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. github.com. The counts are computed by scripts/frequency_natale.py in Verbavia’s repository and printed from its output rather than typed.