As Southerton (2006: 451) observes, the day is the context for the allocation of composite practices distributed in different periods of time (morning, afternoon, evening and night) and week (weekdays, Saturday, Sunday).

Studies first by Vanek (1974) and then by Hochschild (1997) started to speak of time density, the tendency to do more activities in units of time that, as they are fixed, end up as being seen as scarce. About this issue Luhmann wrote his well-known article on the scarcity of time and the urgency of deadlines (1971) opening the field to studies into the complexity of everyday time in subsequent decades. The entry of women into the workforce and, more generally, the inclination of people to carry out an increasing number of activities, posed for the first time the problem of lack of time and the issue of balancing paid and domestic work (Gershuny 2009). The reduction and the increasing flexibility of time spent in physiological activities are considered practices that affect people well-being: it is now widely recognised that well-being depends not only on income and personal satisfaction but also on the quality of the social and environmental context and on how people engage their activities in relation to their time (Southerton 2003, Gershuny 2011).Ĥ Change in time-use and in the distribution of activities within a 24-hour day affect people’s quality of life. Most studies observe a tendency to a time-space compression and fragmentation of the daily activities, in contrast with the distribution of those practices in the past (Gershuny 2000, Gershuny 2009). According to findings of surveys focused on the use of time, both in Italy and in the major Western Countries, people spend less and less time doing physiological activities such as sleeping and eating (Fisher and Robinson 2011). A well-established tradition in sociological and geographical studies has emphasised the changing of practices within a 24-hour day, above all between broad activities of personal care, leisure, paid and/unpaid work and domestic labour ( Southerton 2006). The night as an emerging time-space frameworkģ The topic of the use of time became an object of interest, not just scientific, following the spread of the problems related to its management.

In particular, this study aims to analyse the rhythms of the night in Italy devoting attention to the duration, the density and the temporal sequence of night activities. This paper shares this choice and gives the results of a secondary analysis carried out on the latest survey on the use of time (2008-2009) by the Italian National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT).

Empirical studies dedicated to this topic share a choice of setting these borders at those points where most of the population stops or restarts activities before and after sleeping. It is undeniable however that, compared to the past, night-time hours in people’s agendas are increasingly taken up with activities (Grazian 2009) and that the borders between day and night are less and less well-defined.Ģ Indeed, in densely populated places, like today’s cities, nights are rarely without activity (Smith and Hall 2013) and it is increasingly more difficult to establish borders for the night. Conquering the night, as this process has often been called, however did not happen everywhere and there are many places where nights continue to be dark, even in modern countries.

The factory lights led to the first night shifts, anticipating what, over the next century, would happen to recreational activities, in places of entertainment, and to travel, in those of mobility. As is well known it was with the urban industrial societies, developed in Europe at the end of the 18th century, that nights started to be illuminated. 1 Most of the history of humanity is populated by dark nights, due to the fact that public lighting is a fairly recent conquest but also because, marked by the cycles of nature, human activities have for a long time been concentrated during the daytime hours.

Average wake up time by country