Start at a Cemetery Gate on the Evening of 1 November
By late afternoon on 1 November, the flower stalls outside Turin's cemeteries are doing steady business in chrysanthemums, and by dusk the graves are lit — candles placed on the tombs on the evening before the commemoration, as is customary across Italy. This is the heart of the observance: 1 November is All Saints' Day (Ognissanti), a public holiday across Italy, when government offices, schools and many private businesses close and public transport runs to a Sunday schedule. The following day, 2 November, is All Souls' Day — *la commemorazione dei defunti*, also called *Giorno dei Morti* — when many Italians travel home to be with family and visit the graves of deceased relatives. If you are in Turin for these two days, you are in the middle of a national ritual, not a tourist spectacle, and the city's cemeteries are where it is most visible.
You do not need to be Catholic to move through this thoughtfully. In Roman Catholicism, 1 November is a Holy Day of Obligation, with Mass required unless excused; when the date falls on a Monday or Saturday adjacent to a Sunday, attendance is encouraged but not required. The usual reading is the Beatitudes from Matthew, and it has become increasingly common to commemorate those who died during the year.
Buy Chrysanthemums and Fave dei Morti
The two things to carry with you through these days are flowers and a specific cookie.
- Chrysanthemums. These are the flowers placed on graves in Italian cemeteries. Buy them from the stalls that cluster around cemetery entrances and let them set the tone of your visit.
- Fave dei morti — "beans of the dead." The traditional All Souls' sweet, linked to the ancient Roman use of black broad beans in funeral rites, when beans were thrown over mourners' shoulders to honour the dead. The cookie custom itself arose in Perugia. Look for them in pastry shops and at seasonal market stalls and eat them the way Italians do at this time of year — as a small, faintly solemn treat rather than a novelty.
Turin's own culinary traditions are worth pairing with the season while you are out: this is a city of aperitivo, vermouth and coffee, and a day spent between a cemetery and a warm café is a very Turinese way to mark the commemoration.
Watch How the City Marks the Dead — and Where Halloween Fits
Halloween — *dolcetto o scherzetto*, trick-or-treating — has been growing among Italian children, and you will see it in Turin, but All Saints' and All Souls' remain the more traditional observances. If you want to understand the older layer beneath the modern one, the history is right there: the feast has possible roots in a 4th-century Greek Christian festival honouring saints and martyrs on the Sunday after Pentecost; the first recorded All Saints' Day was 13 May 609 AD, when Pope Boniface IV received the Pantheon in Rome from Emperor Phocas and dedicated it to the Virgin and all martyrs; in 835 AD, under Pope Gregory III, the feast moved to 1 November and was extended to all saints. The date was likely chosen to replace the pagan feast of the dead, Samhain — and the eve of Samhain, when people dressed as creatures to confuse spirits, carried over into Halloween, a contraction of "All Hallows' Eve."
Italy's regional customs vary, and knowing them enriches what you see. In Sicily, the dead are said to rise and bring gifts to well-behaved children. In Sardinia, children go door to door asking for offerings from the dead. In Rome, families eat a meal near their loved ones' gravesites. In Abruzzo and Trentino, lanterns are made by placing candles in pumpkins. Turin sits in Piedmont, with its own observance centred on the family grave and the cemetery visit; the constant across all of it is the candle, the chrysanthemum and the return home.
Plan Around the Calendar
Both dates are fixed and easy to build a trip around. All Saints' Day falls on 1 November and All Souls' Day on 2 November. Expect the country to slow on the first of those: public offices, schools and many businesses close, and transport runs on a Sunday timetable. Trains and roads fill as Italians travel home to be with family — book accordingly if you are moving between cities.
Note that observance is not identical everywhere. Finland and Sweden keep All Saints' Day on the Saturday between 31 October and 6 November; the Netherlands marks it on the first Sunday in November, and it is not a public holiday there. In Italy the dates hold. Some churches, following the feast's abolition as a church festival in 1770, now mark it on the first Sunday of November — worth checking with a local parish if attending Mass is part of your plan.
Make a Day of It Beyond the Cemetery
Turin rewards a slow itinerary. Build your day around the cemetery visit and the flower stalls, then let the city's everyday pleasures carry the rest: a morning coffee standing at the bar, a long lunch, an afternoon aperitivo as the light goes. The season's food is the sweet, plain, almond-and-bean register of *fave dei morti* rather than anything elaborate, and it suits the mood. Because the sources give no Turin-specific 2026 programme of markets, concerts or parades for these dates, treat the city's reliable rhythm — the cemetery, the flowers, the family meal, the Mass — as your structure, and fill the hours between with Turin itself.
Book your travel early enough to arrive before 1 November, when the trains are still quiet and the flower stalls are just opening. Two days later you will have seen a side of Italy that most visitors miss entirely: not a festival staged for an audience, but a country turning, together, toward its dead.