Florence and Arezzo Christmas Markets: The Dates Nobody Agrees On

We went looking for the 2026 dates of the Florence Christmas market and found seven sources giving four different start dates and three different end dates. Two of them say in their own words that they are guessing from last year. Google’s summary at the top of the results picks one of the wrong ones.

So this page does the boring thing nobody else did: it goes to the city’s own listing, and to the market organiser’s, and tells you which is which.

Seven sources, four different start dates

Here is what each one published for the same market, all read on 29 September 2026.

Two things are worth pulling out of that table. The first is that the two official bodies disagree with each other: the city says 14 November to 20 December and the region says 15 November to 21 December. One day at each end, on the same market, from two public tourism organisations.

The second is that the honest sources are the ones that look worst. Andrew & Kait say plainly that the 2026 dates have not been announced and that they are quoting 2025. Ultimate Christmas Markets labels its dates “expected, based on previous years”. They are the only two being straight with you, and they are the two Google is least likely to show as a confident answer.

What the city of Florence actually publishes

Feel Florence, run by the city, lists the market as an event with a date range, opening hours, a price and a phone number. These are its figures, not ours:

• 14 November to 20 December 2026, Piazza Santa Croce.
• Monday to Thursday 10:00 to 22:00. Friday to Sunday 10:00 to 23:00.
• Entry: 0.00 euros. It is a public square.
• Over fifty wooden chalets. It is formally a Weihnachtsmarkt, a German-style market, which is why the food is more pretzel and Glühwein than panforte.
• Run by an operator called Europa Market, whose contact details the city publishes.

If you only take one thing from this page, take the dates and the fact that the city’s own listing exists. It is in Italian, it is not the page Google sends you to, and it is the only one that has been updated for 2026 with the operator named.

Arezzo, where the festival and the market are two things

Arezzo has the other big Tuscan Christmas market, and it has a worse version of the same problem. Its own event site and its own city council disagree by a day, exactly like Florence. But there is a second, bigger confusion underneath that one.

Arezzo Città del Natale is the whole city dressed for Christmas: lights, shows, exhibitions, music. That runs to 6 January. The Tyrolean village, the wooden stalls in Piazza Grande that people mean when they say “the Christmas market”, closes on 27 December.

Ten days apart, described by two official-looking sites, with almost nobody saying they are different things. If you go to Arezzo on 3 January for the market, you will find a beautifully lit city and an empty Piazza Grande.

The organiser markets the Tyrolean village as the largest in Italy. We have not verified that and are not going to repeat it as a fact.

Which one to go to, and the 31 minute train

If you are already in Florence, the honest answer is that you do not have to choose, because of something we measured for another page entirely.

Arezzo is thirty-one minutes from Florence on one of the three Frecciarossa a day that stop there, and on the day we counted the whole timetable, the cheapest of those cost 9.90 euros, ten cents more than the slow regional train that takes an hour. Forty-six of the fifty-one daily services are direct. The working is in our guide to things to do in Tuscany.

So the two markets are an hour apart door to door and under twenty euros return. The useful way to split them:

• Florence if you have one evening. The market is five minutes from Santa Croce itself and you were going to walk past it anyway. It closes at 22:00 on weekdays, so it works after a museum day.
• Arezzo if you have a day, or if you are travelling between 27 December and 6 January, when Florence’s market has already packed up and Arezzo’s lights are still on.
• Both if you are there in the first half of December, which is the only window when the two overlap at full strength.

Where the trains actually leave from, and which of Florence’s three stations your ticket names, is in Florence train stations. What else is worth your time in the city is in things to do in Florence.

What we have not checked, and why it matters in December

A week before we wrote this, somebody posted in a Florence travel group that they would be in the city on Christmas Day, that their travel agent had told them most things would be closed, and that they needed a plan. It is the right question and we are not going to answer it badly.

We have not verified the 25 December opening hours of the Uffizi, the Accademia or the Duomo complex for this year, and we are not going to copy them from anywhere. Museum holiday hours are published late and change, and this is exactly the kind of figure that gets repeated for three years after it stops being true, which is the whole problem this page is about.

What we can tell you is where to look rather than what to believe: each monument publishes its own calendar, and which site is the official one for each of them, plus how to spot a reseller, is in our guide to Florence tickets. Check those in December, not now, and check them again the week before you fly.

Two other things we deliberately leave out. We have not been to either market in December and will not tell you what the atmosphere is like. And we quote no prices for food or drink at the stalls, because nobody publishes them and the figures circulating in blogs have no source attached.

One last note on what is not on this page. We earn a commission on tours booked through this site and there is nothing here to book, for the best reason we have had yet: the city’s own listing gives the entry price as 0.00 euros. We looked for a Christmas market tour worth recommending and found only general food tours that happen to run in December. A free public square does not need an intermediary.

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