What does “fare il ponte” mean in Italian?
Cosa significa l’espressione italiana “fare il ponte”
A2 Italian listening practice · Venetian Italian · Picked for people who know a little
When an Italian public holiday lands on a Tuesday, the Monday in between is a ponte — a bridge. Fare il ponte means taking that stranded working day off so the weekend and the holiday join into one long break. Schools and offices do it collectively, so the whole country empties out at once. Learn to read an Italian calendar and you can spot the ponti months before anyone announces them.
The clip gives the classic case — a holiday on Tuesday, so “fanno il ponte sabato, domenica, lunedì e martedì.” When two holidays fall close enough to link, Italians call the result a maxi-ponte; the most famous ones cluster around 25 aprile and 1° maggio, a week apart. The speaker also notes the generational shift: “quando io ero piccola… non facevano tanti ponti” — back then going to school was a privilege, not something to bridge over.
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Source: wordfreq 3.1.1 (general) · OpenSubtitles 2018 (HermitDave) (spoken). These numbers are close, not perfect.