What are winters and summers like in Friuli, compared with home?

The sea keeps the shoreline soft. Just 5 towns average 5 °C or more in January, every one of them on the sea or the lagoon between Muggia and Lignano; the mildest is Muggia. In Trieste the average January low holds at 3.6 °C, while Vienna drops to −1.3 °C and Munich to −1.8 °C.

Inland, winter is much like Milan's: Udine averages 3.8 °C. In the mountains it is properly Alpine, with Tarvisio at −2.1 °C.

Milan's official rainfall series has incomplete years, so we leave it out.

The real heat is on the plain. For the median town on the lower Friulian plain the July high averages 30.4 °C, and the thermometer passes 30 °C on 48 days a year; around San Daniele, in the moraine hills, the figures are 29.2 °C and 36 days. The daytime high barely moves, the number of hot days does.

Right on the sea there are fewer days above 30 °C, 24 in Lignano and 32 in Trieste, but the nights stay warm: the low stays above 20 °C on 59 nights a year in Lignano, 56 in Trieste and 10 in Udine. Vienna has 6. In the mountains summer is cool: Sappada's average July high is 21.2 °C.

Friuli is wet, and very unevenly so. According to ARPA, the regional environment agency that runs the weather service, the Prealps get between 2,400 mm and 3,400 mm a year, figures it ranks among the highest in Europe, with the peak on the Julian Prealps; the coast gets between 900 mm and 1,000 mm.

Measured at the town hall, the wettest is Taipana with 2,590 mm, followed by Lusevera (2,530 mm) and Resia (2,470 mm). The lower plain has a median of 1,180 mm, Lignano 980 mm. Even Udine, with 1,410 mm, gets more rain than Munich (940 mm) or Vienna (674 mm).

Few stations record lying snow; here we only quote those with a 1991–2020 series. Tarvisio has snow on the ground 78 days a year, Forni di Sopra 84; Klagenfurt 53, Munich 42, Vienna 32. In Trieste snow lies for less than a day a year on average (0.8).

We have no snow measurement for Sappada, but we do have frost: the low drops below zero on 138 days a year, and its July high, 21.2 °C, is the lowest in the region. The town with the most frost days is Tarvisio, with 143.

The bora is the dry, cold east-north-easterly that ARPA describes as the dominant wind on the coast, mostly in winter. At the Molo Bandiera station in Trieste, gusts exceed 72 km/h on 49 days a year (1995–2024); the strongest measured there, on 11 February 2012, reached 168 km/h. At the Sgonico station, up on the Karst, the count is 3, in Udine 1. Wind shifts a great deal over short distances, so these figures describe the station, not every house.

• Friuli's towns: ARPA FVG's 1991–2020 climate normals on the regional grid, read at each town hall. The comparison cities, Milan included: each one's official weather station over the same thirty years.
• Reliability: we rate it low for 2 towns, Grado and Duino Aurisina. Grado's town hall stands on the shore, where the grid has no value, so the nearest valid cell is used; in Duino Aurisina lows and frost days are softened by the sea, while the village itself, up on the Karst, is colder. For 15 other towns, Trieste and Lignano among them, it is medium. On the shoreline the grid errs on the cool side: on Trieste's Molo Bandiera the ARPA station records a January mean of 7.0 °C, 5 frost days and 76 nights above 20 °C.
• Wind and snow come from stations (ARPA; for snow in Tarvisio and Trieste, the Italian Air Force weather service), not the grid: no station, no figure.