Florence in December: Do You Need a Winter Coat, and How Many Days Will Be Wet

The question people actually ask before a December trip to Florence is not what the average temperature is. It is whether they can get away with a packable jacket instead of a bulky coat, and how many of their days are going to be rained on. A monthly average answers neither.

So we counted the days instead of averaging them. Eleven Decembers, 341 individual days, from the ERA5 reanalysis for the centre of Florence.

The average is the least useful number

Across those eleven Decembers the average high is 12.0 °C and the average low is 3.6 °C. Both are true and neither helps you pack, because an average of 3.6 at night is made up of nights at 8 and nights at minus 2, and you dress for the second kind.

The useful version is the spread. Here is every December day from 2015 to 2025, sorted by how much rain fell on it.

How many of your days will be wet

Sixty-one per cent of December days are dry. Add the ones where it only spits and four days in five need nothing more than a hood.

For a trip, the arithmetic that matters is this one. On five days in Florence in December, the expected split is roughly three dry days, one with drizzle and one properly wet. That is a very different planning problem from “it rains in December”, and it means one indoor day is usually enough insurance. The Uffizi is the obvious place to spend it, and December is the month with the shortest queues.

The coat question, answered properly

Two numbers decide this. Only 6% of December days never reach 8 °C, and 20% reach 14 °C or more. Daytime Florence in December is mild far more often than it is cold, and the warmest December day in the run hit 20.3.

But 21% of nights are at or below freezing, and the sun is down by twenty to five. You will be out in the cold half of the day whether you intended to be or not, because the day ends while you are still sightseeing.

Which makes the practical answer: layers, something genuinely windproof and waterproof over them, and a hat, rather than a heavy coat you carry around a gallery all afternoon. The wind off the Arno at night is what people remember, not the temperature.

It is dark by a quarter to five, and that barely changes

Nine hours of daylight is the headline, and the shortest day is the 21st with 8 hours 54 minutes. But look at the sunset column rather than the daylight one.

The sun sets between 16:42 and 16:49 every single day of December. It does not keep getting earlier. What keeps getting later is the sunrise, which slides twenty minutes across the month. So the afternoons stop shortening around the middle of December while the mornings carry on.

For planning, that means your usable daylight is one block from about half eight to half four, and it is the same block on the 3rd as on the 30th. An early start buys you more than a late finish ever will. It also means the Christmas market is lit for most of the hours it is open, which is rather the point of it.

One December is nothing like another

This is the part that should temper everything above. Dry days range from 8 to 29 out of 31 depending on the year. December 2015 had six millimetres of rain in the entire month. December 2020 had 195.

So the three-in-five figure is a good planning assumption and a terrible guarantee. If your dates are fixed, pack for the wet version and enjoy being wrong. The one thing worth saying with confidence is that the second half of December is drier than the first in this run, 67% dry days against 55%, which is the opposite of what most people assume about the run-up to Christmas.

If you are choosing between months

People moving their dates around usually assume they are picking a drier month. They are not. The share of dry days barely moves between October and March.

Two things fall out of that table. November is wetter than December, 133 millimetres against 101, and has slightly fewer dry days. Moving a trip from December back into November to catch better weather moves it into the wettest month of the six.

And January is the driest of the lot, at 77 millimetres and 65% dry days, while also being the coldest, with nearly a third of nights at or below freezing.

So the real trade is not rain. Between October and March you are choosing a temperature, not a probability of getting wet. Freezing nights go from none in October to 4% in November, 21% in December and 31% in January. That is the number that should move your dates, if anything does.

What we have not checked

• We have not been in Florence in December. Everything above is measurement, not experience, and we are not going to tell you how the city feels in the rain.
• Wind and humidity are not in these figures. They are the reason a damp 6 °C by the river feels worse than a dry 2 °C inland, and we have not quantified either, so treat the temperature table as temperature and nothing more.
• This is climate, not a forecast. Eleven years tells you what to pack two months out. It tells you nothing about your actual dates, and no amount of historical data ever will. Check a forecast in the week before you fly.
• Snow. We have not counted snowfall days, only temperature and precipitation, so we say only that the temperature pattern is not one that produces lying snow and leave it there.

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