White Truffle Season in Italy Is Set by Law, and Tuscany Has Moved Its Dates

Search for when truffle season starts and you get restaurant pages and agency pages answering with a word: autumn. The real answer is a date, it is the same date every year, and it has nothing to do with the weather.

The sentence that decides what you can actually eat is the last paragraph of the same article.

Prohibited, not discouraged. That is why this calendar is visible to a customer at all. A Tuscan restaurant does not stop shaving white truffle in January out of seasonal good taste. It stops because the fresh product cannot legally be sold.

Preserved truffle is a different legal object with its own articles, its own label and, in article 11, its own sterilisation temperature. That is why a jar can sit on a shelf in July while the fresh thing cannot cross a counter.

Four of the nine species account for nearly everything a visitor will be offered, and they do not overlap the way people assume.

• Tuber magnatum, the white truffle, 1 October to 31 December.
• Tuber melanosporum, the black winter truffle, 15 November to 15 March.
• Tuber aestivum, the summer truffle or scorzone, 1 May to 30 November. The long one, and the cheap one.
• Tuber albidum or borchii, the bianchetto, 15 January to 30 April. It arrives after the white truffle has gone, it is pale, and it is a separate species with a separate window.

Which one is on the table is not a matter of trust. Article 7 requires that fresh truffles put out for sale carry a printed card giving the Latin and Italian name of each species and variety, and the geographical zone they were gathered in. Species and place, in writing, on the stall. If a market table has no card, that is the question to ask before the price.

Until recently the single most useful fact in this subject was that Tuscany ran ahead of everyone. Regional law 50 of 1995, article 13, let the white truffle be searched for across the region from 10 September, three weeks before the national date. Guides still repeat it. Ours does. It is no longer true.

Regional law 36 of 2 August 2023 replaced the 1995 act, and its article 8 writes a new calendar. The Tuscan white truffle now runs from 1 October to 15 January. The head start has gone from the front of the season and a fortnight has been added to the back of it.

Then the second paragraph of that article does something nobody saw coming. Searching and gathering, of every species, is banned across the whole region for the whole of May and the whole of September. The law names it: fermo ecologico, a closed season for the ground rather than for any one truffle.

The switch was tied to a regulation rather than to a date. Article 23 says the new law applies from the day the implementing regulation under article 20 enters into force, and that the 1995 act is repealed on that same day. The regulation is Decree 2/R of 8 January 2025, published in the Bollettino Ufficiale della Regione Toscana of 10 January 2025. So this autumn is not the first run under the new rules, and the 10 September that is still all over the internet has been wrong for two seasons.

What that means for a trip is narrow and concrete. A Tuscan truffle hunt offered for a date in September cannot legally include the hunt. In October the Tuscan and national windows finally agree with each other. And in the first half of January, when Piedmont has closed, Tuscany is still open.

Article 8 does not stop at months. It sets the hours of the day, in solar time, when searching is allowed, and they shrink as the light does: 5.30 to 18.30 in October, 6.30 to 17.30 in November, 7.00 to 17.30 in December, adjusted while summer time is running. Article 7 then lists searching outside those hours among the things that are flatly prohibited, alongside turning over the soil and taking unripe truffles.

The same article is unexpectedly specific about method, and it explains most of what you are watching if you have paid to stand in a wood. Searching is done with the help of at most two dogs, one of which may be in training. Digging is done with a vanghetto, whose blade may be no more than five centimetres by five. The hole is refilled with the same soil, at once. And the person doing it has to hold a tesserino issued by the region and be up to date with its annual payment.

So the hunter with the muddy dog is a licence holder working inside a timetable. The careful refilling of the hole is not showmanship for the group. It is the condition of being allowed to be there.

Alba is where the whole calendar points, and the 96th Fiera Internazionale del Tartufo Bianco d'Alba runs from 10 October to 6 December 2026. Two things on the organiser's own pages are worth having before you book a train.

The first is the opening. The Alba White Truffle World Market is open on Saturdays and Sundays only, 9.30 to 19.30, last entry at 19.00, in the Cortile della Maddalena with the entrance from Piazza Falcone. A full ticket is €6, under-15s go free, and groups over thirty pay €4.50 booked online. A midweek visit to Alba is a visit to a town with a fair on. The market itself is a weekend.

The second is what happens to a truffle before it reaches a table, and it is the part worth travelling for. The Municipality of Alba appoints a committee of experts each year and issues a regulation that every seller at the fair, hunter or trader, has to work under. Inside the market a panel of sensory analysis judges sits through the opening hours, and the sequence is published: the hunters hand the truffles over, the judges assess them, a sensory analysis is carried out, the ones found fit for sale are weighed and counted, and each goes into a numbered bag.

A numbered bag and a right to swap is not how most food is sold anywhere, and it is most of what separates buying in the Cortile from buying in a shop with a nice window. The judges are drawn from the Centro Nazionale Studi Tartufo, and the organiser says plainly that an inexperienced buyer should ask them for help before paying. Take that literally. It is a free service staffed by the only people in the room with no stake in the sale.

The most expensive single experience we sell in Florence is a truffle hunt, and the number deserves to be put next to the others rather than admired on its own.

It runs out to San Miniato, which is the Tuscan town the white truffle comes from, with a working hunter and her Lagotto Romagnolo. Seven hours door to door from Florence, eight people at most, lunch of tagliolini al tartufo at the family villa, a Chianti tasting on the drive back. Read on 14 October 2026 it carried 139 reviews at an average of 5.0, and the price was €335.

Two of our own numbers put that in proportion. Across the 429 experiences on this site the median price is €69 and the median hourly rate is €19.70. This one works out at roughly €48 an hour, two and a half times the catalogue. It is also one of the fifteen experiences out of 429 that cannot be cancelled at all. The operator's policy is four words: all sales are final.

Whether that is worth it depends on what you think is being sold, and it is not truffles. The thing a food tour sells is rarely the food, and here it is a licence holder, a trained dog, private woodland in the weeks the law is open, and a cooked lunch. The listing promises the hunt, the meal and the tasting. It does not promise a truffle, and it could not.

The non-refundable line matters more than the price. Most food experiences are a short-notice purchase: 413 of our 429 can be cancelled free until the day before. A truffle day in October is the opposite, a fixed point booked weeks ahead, and the one thing you cannot do with it is change your mind.

The commonest thing a visitor carries home from truffle country is a small bottle of oil, and it is the one product in this article the truffle law does not reach.

Follow what the statute actually governs. Fresh truffle, article 7: the printed card, the species in Latin and Italian, the zone of collection. Preserved truffle, article 9: a sealed container with the packer's name, where the plant is, the species in Latin and Italian, the grade and the drained net weight in grams. Article 11 permits water, salt, and if you like wine, liqueur or spirit, obliges any other substance to be declared on the label, and bans colouring agents outright.

A flavoured oil is neither of those things. It is not fresh truffle and it is not preserved truffle, so none of those duties attach, and the question of what is in the bottle drops back to ordinary food labelling. Read the ingredient list. It is a dull answer, and it is the whole answer. Our page on food stories checked against the documents has more of this kind of thing, where the folklore and the paperwork disagree.

In 2021, at its sixteenth session, the UNESCO committee inscribed "Truffle hunting and extraction in Italy, traditional knowledge and practice" on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, file 01395. The inscription is about the knowledge and about the working relationship between a hunter and a dog. It says nothing about the product.

Put the two instruments side by side and the shape is slightly strange and rather good. One protects the practice of finding the thing. The other shuts the market for most of the year so that what is sold in the open months is what it claims to be. Between them they are why the dates in this article are worth more than the ones on a restaurant's homepage.

One limit on everything above, and we would rather state it than let you find it. Article 6 lets a region vary the national calendar by ordinance after consulting specialist research centres. We read the Tuscan law in full because Tuscany is where the famous exception lived. We have not read all twenty regions. If you are going elsewhere in Italy for the truffle, treat the national dates as the floor and check the region.