Italian Name Day Calendar

Find out the Saint of the Day and every saint or blessed who is celebrated on every day of the year.
You can also find the name day of hundreds of Italian and English names.

Saint of the Day
Name Day

Select the day and tap on "SEARCH". Every day of the year several saints and blesseds are celebrated: some of them are traditionally more "important" than others.
That's why we have highlighted some saints as "traditional" according to popular sentiment.

Which is the difference between Saints and Blesseds?

Catholic Church involves several steps in the process of declaring someone a saint. The initial investigation can only start at least 5 years after the death of someone who has distinguished himself during his life for his faith and behaviour.

The first title assigned is Servant of God and is given to a person who has stood out for a "santity of life". Once the process has started, the Congregation for the Causes of Saints will issue a decree that demonstrates the practice of Christian virtues heroically (it's called "heroic virtue") or death by martyrdom: at this point the title of Venerable can be used.

For the next steps it is necessary that the Venerable has performed one attested miracle to become officially Blessed: the final decision on beatification is up to the Pope anyway.
In order to be promoted to Saint, the Blessed must perform a further attested miracle after his/her beatification.

The appellations Holy and Blessed refer to men and women while the term Most Holy indicates only God.

Saint of the day calendar is updated to 2020

Our archive currently contains over 4,600 saints and blesseds listed by the Roman Martyrology: there are also hundreds of servants of God and venerables.

The archive is constantly updated since every year the Pope celebrates the canonization of dozens of new saints: every year new servants of God are also appointed and there are "advancements" to  the grade of venerable and blessed.

Is name day very popular in Italy?

Still nowadays many Italians celebrate their name day or as we call it "onomastico" (a term derived from the Greek verb onomázein, "to call by name").

A common observance in many Catholic countries, "onomastico" refers to celebrating someone's name coinciding with the saint honored on a particular day.

Usually, in every Italian kitchen there's a calendar hanging on the wall with a list of all the Saints celebrated on every single day.

In the past, many parents would name their newborn after the saint that appeared on the calendar on the day of birth; sometimes they would honoured the local patron (for example Santa Rosalia is the patroness of Palermo and the name Rosalia is indeed highly popular in that area).

Someone would say that the "onomastico" is a tradition that is observed more in the central and southern part of Italy and that somewhere is even more important than birthday itself: it could be in some way true but as a general rule we can say that everyone along the peninsula care at least about it (everybody would appreciate a "buon onomastico" wishes) but that's enough and very few would expect a real celebration with store-bought pastries or even a gift.

We have to mention that not every Italian celebrates a name-day: in fact there are a lot of Italian names that doesn't have a corresponding saint such as Cinzia, Giada or Debora.

Generally, Italians can say the most common name-days without consulting the calendar: everybody in Italy knows that December 26th is Santo Stefano so you can wish "buon onomastico" to all your friends and relatives named Stefano or Stefania.

Another well-known feast name occurs on October 4th, day dedicated to the memory of St. Francis of Assisi (patron saint of Italy) and celebrated by all men and women whose names are Francesca or Francesco (one of the most common first names in Italy).

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