The custom of celebrating the New Year's Eve is old but not ancient.
The ancient Romans used for many centuries a calendar lunar: Romulus, first king of Rome, had divided the year into 10 months and the year began in March, with the spring.
Julius Caesar decided to instead go to the solar calendar, which lasts 365 days a year, every four years is a leap year and 12 months. A nearly equal to that of today, but not totally identical. The beginning of the new year was still very elastic, celebrated between January and March depending on the location. The Julian calendar
considered the average duration of a year of 365 days and 6 hours (every 4 years and this is retrieved 24 hours a leap year). In fact Julius Caesar's astronomers had miscalculated by 11 minutes and 14 seconds.
little thing, you think! But the great thing, because it accumulates so every 128 years a day late: in 1582 days of delays were even 10!
This complicated life even to the Vatican that began to have problems to fix the date of Easter. In fact, Pope Gregory XIII
must have thought: "If we go on like this sooner or later the Easter we celebrate at Christmas! No no, here we must find a remedy."
So, in October of 1582 the calendar is reformed. First we recover the lost ten days (October 4, 1582 and we went directly to 15 October). At the same time, not to create too much
The planet Saturn in the Chronograph of 354
confusion, since October 4 was a Thursday, the day after, October 15, automatically became a Friday.
Then he lay down new rules for leap years, so that in the long term should not happen again what happened with the Julian calendar.
New Year, even after the spread of the Gregorian calendar, we continue to celebrate on different days depending on geographical areas. In many cities, the beginning of the year in March (Florence and Pisa 25, Venice 1), anyone celebrating Christmas, in southern Italy is celebrated according to the Byzantine tradition on 1 September.
At the end of the seventeenth century Pope Innocent XII indicates January 1 as the first day of the year. And slowly over most of the world accepts this date.
remain naturally different traditions: the Orthodox Church follows the Julian calendar and the Muslim world that follows a lunar calendar when the year is 11 days shorter than solar (in 2008 the Islamists have in fact celebrated twice New Year, once in January for the arrival of 1429 and once in December for the arrival of 1430), the Iranian New Year, the Norouz, is celebrated with the spring equinox, March 21, and then in the various traditions Eastern New Year falls on different days.
One last thing. The fascist regime attempted to revolutionize the calendar by setting the date of 28 October (anniversary of the March on Rome) as a new year of the Fascist Era. Fortunately the attempt was a fiasco.
And luckily none of today's politicians are still coming in such an idea. Ma .. never say never.
