I find this very dubious. Whatever the case may have been for the merchant class in the cities, the vast majority of people were farmers, and farmers don't get days off...cows still have to be brought back and forth from the fields and milked, the chicken coop and rabbit hutch still have to be cleaned and the animals fed, the hay has to be brought in when the weather permits, and the harvest of the grapes and olives waits for no one.
From what I know from the old people of farm life in Italy until after the second world war, the peasants worked all the hours that God sent, from before first light to darkness, with a few hours out of the sun mid-day because otherwise they would have collapsed from heat stroke. At night they mended tools or made furniture, or, in the case of the women, knitted or spun, or wove or sewed, after the meals were cooked and everything cleaned away, of course.
As for women in general, unless they were of the small percentage that had servants, how much leisure, pray tell, could they have had in an era before mass produced baby food, disposable diapers, or even washing machines for the diapers. These women were pregnant every two or three years at a minimum, caring for broods of children, cooking, cleaning, washing, for all of them, and helping out with the animals and in the fields when necessary as well. Feast days just meant cooking for the whole town instead of just your family. I can get nostalgic about the old days too, but I think we have to be realistic about what it was like to actually live in that era as a common person. Thank-god for modern technology is all I can say. Oh, and birth control as well.
And if that isn't enough, the average work week in many European countries is 35 hours a week, and they have at a minimum 4 weeks of paid vacation a year, plus national holidays, plus sick leave. Their ancestors wouldn't recognize such a world.