Italy marks Liberation Day with holiday on 25 April 2023.
Italy on 25 April celebrates the Festa della Liberazione which marks the country’s liberation from German occupation and fascist rule at the end of world war two.
A public holiday across Italy, all state schools and offices are closed on Tuesday 25 April, with many Italians planning a “ponte” long weekend by taking Monday 24 April off work.
The day is marked in Rome with a ceremony at the Altare della Patria at 09.00 when Italian president Sergio Mattarella will lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
The event will result in traffic diversions and bus detours in the area around Piazza Venezia.
- Why does Italy celebrate Liberation Day on 25 April?
Also in Rome, at 08.30 supporters of ANPI, the National Partisan Association of Italy, will pay homage to the victims of the massacre at the Fosse Ardeatine where the Nazis murdered 335 anti-fascist prisoners, Jews and civilians on 23 March 1944.
This solemn event is followed at 10.00 with a walk from Largo Benedetto Bompiani, in the Ardeatino / Tor Marancia area, to Piazza di Porta S. Paolo by the Piramide Cestia landmark.
Italy’s state-run museums and archaeological sites will be open to the public for free on 25 April, the country’s culture minister announced last week.
This year Rome will celebrate the Italian Resistance with a three-day festival in the Garbatella district, backed by the capital’s centre-left mayor Roberto Gualtieri, from 23-25 April.
Last year Gualtieri marked the Festa della Liberazione by visiting the Historic Museum of the Liberation of Rome, a former SS prison which documents the persecution of Jews and Resistance figures tortured there during the Nazi occupation of Rome from 1943-1944.
