The Italian passato remoto: when to use it and when you really don’t need to
One of the most mysterious Italian grammar topics for people who study with me is the passato remoto — the Italian remote past tense. In traditional textbooks it usually appears at B1 level in a chapter about history, with exercises featuring Garibaldi, Cavour and Italian emigrants from the early XX century. But people encounter the passato remoto in very different ways.
The first is the traditional one — textbooks and history chapters. The second is when they search Google for “how many verb forms does Italian have?” and find pages listing every conjugation, including the passato remoto. Beginners don’t quite know what it is, but just seeing it there is enough to cause alarm. The third is when they start reading a novel in Italian and find it practically everywhere. The fourth is when they’ve seen content creators talking about it online, memes making it look impossibly difficult, or videos claiming that people in certain regions of Italy use it all the time — so it’s absolutely essential to learn.
There’s a lot of confusion around this topic. As an online Italian teacher, I want to help you understand it a little better.
What is the Italian passato remoto and when is it used?
The passato remoto is a tense of the indicative mood. Like the passato prossimo, it describes an action that began and ended in the past. Unlike the passato prossimo, which is used for relatively recent past actions, the passato remoto refers to more distant ones. Structurally, though, there isn’t much difference.
Two sentences like:
Marco è andato al cinema (passato prossimo)
and
Marco andò al cinema (passato remoto)
are practically identical in meaning.
So how do you decide whether a past action is recent or distant? There’s no objective rule. The grammar says to use the passato remoto when an action no longer has any direct effect on the present:
Mio nonno ha comprato questa casa nel 1950 — if my grandfather is still alive and living there.
Mio nonno comprò questa casa nel 1950 — if my grandfather has died and no longer lives there.
That’s the theoretical distinction. But there’s something else to consider.
Is the Italian passato remoto actually used in everyday speech?
No. At least, not as much as the rules suggest, and not as precisely.
In spoken Italian, the passato remoto is almost never used. It’s a form that feels bookish and literary — it even echoes Latin — and in contemporary Italian it’s increasingly rare. Even for events in the distant past, Italians comfortably use the passato prossimo in everyday conversation. For historical events, the historical present is also perfectly acceptable:
Nel 1861 Vittorio Emanuele II diventò re d’Italia can just as well be said as
Nel 1861 Vittorio Emanuele II diventa re d’Italia.
It’s not wrong, and nobody will be shocked. In real daily life, the opportunities to use the passato remoto are genuinely rare.
Is the passato remoto used more in some regions of Italy?
I often come across content from foreign creators claiming that in Sicily, for example, people use the passato remoto instead of the passato prossimo. This might be true in films — but not in reality. I grew up in Sicily and almost all of my family still lives there: none of us ever uses the passato remoto when speaking Italian.
Where does this myth come from? The fact that the Sicilian dialect has no passato prossimo — only the passato remoto. Some older speakers, mentally translating from dialect into Italian, occasionally use it. But it’s an exception, not a rule.
Is it used in books?
This, however, is true. The passato remoto is the narrative tense par excellence. If you read a novel in Italian — whether it’s Harry Potter, a crime thriller or a literary novel by Cesare Pavese — you’ll find it everywhere.
Harry cercò Hermione e vide che stava parlando con Ron…
It’s used in fiction by tradition — it perhaps creates a sense of being in a world apart from everyday life. There’s also a practical reason: the passato remoto is a simple form made up of a single word, while the passato prossimo requires two. When it comes to printing, it takes up less space on the page.
So what should you actually do with this form?
My approach is practical: you can speak Italian perfectly well and live your life without ever using it. Drilling dozens of exercises or memorising its many irregular forms serves very little purpose, in my view.
What’s actually useful is passive knowledge — learning to recognise it so you can read novels, or follow a tour guide explaining the history of a palace. That’s it. We can practise using it during a conversation lesson if you like, but in real life you’ll rarely need it.
If this practical, pressure-free approach to Italian grammar appeals to you, book a free introductory call. Let’s speak Italian together. Even without using the passato remoto.