February in Italy is usually quiet.

Not this year.

With the Winter Olympics pulling half the country into orbit, everything else has shifted around it — Carnival, Sanremo, medieval festivals, and one of the largest religious processions in the world, all compressed into a few weeks.

In this episode: Olympic Italy, masked Venice, an organised orange battle, and a calendar that doesn’t quite make logistical sense.

These are the things actually worth your time in Italy this February.

Let’s begin.

March in Italy gets dismissed as shoulder season which is usually a polite way of saying: don’t bother.

That’s a mistake.

This is the month when Italy opens what it normally keeps closed, stages events it doesn’t repeat in summer, and briefly becomes easier to navigate without a strategy.

In this episode: almond blossom festivals in Sicily, a political assassination reenacted in Rome, private palaces unlocked for a weekend, and a donkey race in Tuscany that refuses to behave.

These are the things actually worth your time in Italy this March. Let’s begin.

April in Italy is not a shoulder season. It’s when everything happens at once ancient rituals, design week, Holy Week processions, and a food calendar that briefly makes sense of the country.

In this episode: a two-thousand-year-old solar alignment inside the Pantheon, a fireworks cart in Florence that either works or doesn’t, Sicily at its most intense, and Milan at its most self-important.

These are five things actually worth your time in Italy this April. Let’s begin.