Daylight Saving Time 2027

On Sunday 28 March, clocks go forward again.
Whether you like it or not.

On the night between Saturday 27 and Sunday 28 March, at 2 o’clock the hands move forward to 3.
An hour less sleep. The alarm goes off at the usual time, but the night is shorter. That’s it.

(Phone and computer do it on their own. Oven, microwave and the car clock—no.)

The trick to not end up a zombie on Monday is to go to bed a little earlier, already for a few evenings. Even just fifteen minutes.

In the morning, the sun will rise later.
In the evening, it’ll get dark earlier.
And there you have it: longer evenings, outdoor aperitifs, and evening strolls after dinner.

But for now, a few curiosities.

Thieves don’t like it.
With an extra hour of light in the evening, robberies drop. That’s what American studies say. Darkness is their office hours.

Cows don’t either.
If you’ve got dairy animals, you know: they want to be milked at the usual time. Humans decide when the clocks change; the cows take a few days to get used to it.

It wasn’t Benjamin Franklin who came up with it.
He joked about it in a satirical article back in 1784. The first to seriously propose it was George Vernon Hudson, a New Zealand entomologist, in 1895. He wanted more light to go out hunting insects after work. I swear.

Then an English builder got involved.
William Willett wrote a pamphlet in 1907. Nobody listened. In 1916, right in the middle of the First World War, Germany and England adopted it to save coal. He’d died the year before. What bad luck.

In Italy, it’s been in place since 1966.
It had already been introduced and done away with several times before. Then, a law from 1965 made it permanent.

The rules come from Europe.
The last Sunday in March you go forward; the last Sunday in October you go back. Across the whole Union.

Is it really necessary?
According to Terna, in 2026 Daylight Saving Time saved about 302 million kWh. More or less the same amount as 115,000 households use in a year.

And abolishing it?
It’s been talked about since 2018. In Italy, there are people asking for Daylight Saving Time all year round, but we can’t decide that on our own. For now, Europe has already set the changes up to 2031.

What about the rest of the world?
In the tropics it doesn’t matter—the light is almost the same all year round. In Australia it’s the opposite, because in March autumn arrives there. Brazil scrapped it in 2019, China in 1991.

So Saturday evening: clocks go forward, and bed goes early.
And from Sunday, an extra hour of light to go out.
Which is, in fact, the reason Calendario Valtellinese exists.