Europe/Rome

TZ identifier and aliases

Europe/Rome is the canonical identifier for Italian civil time. The microstates it fully or partly encloses — Europe/San_Marino and Europe/Vatican — currently share identical rules and are folded into the same entry, since both have long coordinated their clocks with the country surrounding them. Europe/Rome has no deprecated backward-compatibility alias.

UTC offset and DST rule

Europe/Rome is +01:00 (CET) on standard time and +02:00 (CEST) during daylight saving, following the EU-harmonized rule: the last Sunday in March through the last Sunday in October, both at 1am UTC — March 29 and October 25 in 2026.

Using it in cron, CI and Postgres

Set TZ=Europe/Rome for a process that should schedule by Italian local time. Postgres accepts it via SET TIME ZONE 'Europe/Rome'; or the timezone setting, applying the DST rule correctly for any date. Where a scheduler supports a CRON_TZ=Europe/Rome line, jobs run by local time directly; GitHub Actions' schedule: trigger always evaluates in UTC with no per-job timezone, so a job meant to fire at a fixed Rome hour needs its UTC equivalent recalculated across each DST boundary. Avoid the 2:00–3:00am local window for anything that must run exactly once — it's skipped on the March transition and repeated on the October one.

History and quirks

Italy adopted Central European Time in 1893, alongside the same continental push that standardized Germany's clock, and — aside from a WWII-era occupation period when the German-controlled north briefly ran on Berlin's directly-imposed schedule — has kept it ever since. The two microstates fully or partly surrounded by Italian territory, San Marino and Vatican City, have never maintained an independent time zone: both are small enough, and economically intertwined enough with Italy, that keeping a separate clock would offer no practical benefit and only create friction for residents crossing the border daily. Italy's own internal geography produces a milder version of Spain's solar-time mismatch — the country spans a wide north-south range but a comparatively narrow east-west one, so Europe/Rome's single offset works reasonably well for sunrise/sunset across most of the peninsula, unlike Spain where the mismatch is more pronounced. Italy's DST dates align exactly with the rest of the EU's harmonized rule, so Rome, Paris, Berlin and Madrid all shift on the same UTC instant each spring and autumn.

Offsets and DST transitions on this page are computed from the IANA time zone database bundled with your browser; the rules described above were verified against tzdata 2026b when this page was published.