The Italian tenses
Fifteen finite tenses across four moods. Fewer than half are needed to hold a conversation, and this page is ordered so you meet those first.
Italian tenses come in two shapes. Simple tenses are one word, built by adding endings to a stem. Compound tenses are two words, a form of avere or essere plus the past participle, which means seven of the fifteen become easy the moment you know one participle and which auxiliary the verb takes.
A note on ordering, because most English-language resources get this wrong. The congiuntivo imperfetto and congiuntivo trapassato are often filed as advanced or literary. In Italian they carry the hypothetical (se avessi tempo, verrei), which is everyday speech. Likewise the passato remoto is not a museum piece: it is standard in writing and ordinary in conversation south of Rome.
Indicativo
Presente
The presente is the first tense you learn and the one you'll use most. It covers what is happening now, what happens habitually, and what is generally true. Unlike English, it also covers what you're doing right this second and what you've arranged to do tomorrow.
Passato prossimo
The passato prossimo is the everyday past tense in spoken Italian. It's built from two pieces, a present-tense auxiliary plus the past participle, and almost all of the difficulty is in choosing the right auxiliary and getting the participle to agree.
Imperfetto
The imperfetto is the most regular tense in Italian: one set of endings, four irregular verbs in the whole language. The difficulty is never the conjugation. It's knowing when to reach for it instead of the passato prossimo.
Trapassato prossimo
The trapassato prossimo is Italian's past perfect: it marks an action that was already finished before another past action took place. Build it exactly like the passato prossimo, but put the auxiliary in the imperfetto.
Futuro semplice
The futuro semplice takes one set of endings across all three conjugations. The work is in the stem: -are verbs change their a to an e, and a group of very common verbs contract their stem instead.
Futuro anteriore
The futuro anteriore marks an action that will be finished before some other future moment. In practice, Italians use it at least as often for a second job: guessing about something that already happened.
Passato remoto
The passato remoto is the tense of novels, history books and fairy tales, and of ordinary conversation across much of southern Italy. You need it to read, and to understand roughly a third of the country. Its reputation for chaos comes down to one pattern that, once seen, explains almost all of it.
Trapassato remoto
The trapassato remoto is genuinely rare, and unlike the passato remoto it isn't alive anywhere in speech. It appears in one narrow context: a temporal subordinate clause introduced by dopo che, quando or appena, whose main clause is in the passato remoto. Learn to recognise it; don't worry about producing it.
Congiuntivo
Congiuntivo presente
The congiuntivo is the mood of opinion, doubt, emotion and necessity. It's not optional in written or careful Italian, and it's far more alive in speech than the English subjunctive. The good news: it's almost always triggered by a word you can learn as a list.
Congiuntivo passato
The congiuntivo passato is what you use when the trigger is in the present but the action it refers to has already happened. Same triggers as the congiuntivo presente; the only question is timing.
Congiuntivo imperfetto
Do not file this one under "literary". The congiuntivo imperfetto carries the Italian hypothetical (`se avessi tempo…`), which is everyday speech, and it's required whenever a congiuntivo trigger sits in a past tense. It's a B1 tense that learners routinely postpone until B2 and shouldn't.
Congiuntivo trapassato
The congiuntivo trapassato is the second half of the Italian third conditional: `se avessi saputo, sarei venuto`. Like the congiuntivo imperfetto, it belongs in everyday speech, not in a literary appendix. Regret is a normal thing to express.
Condizionale
Condizionale presente
The condizionale presente is how Italian says "would". It's also the tense of politeness: `vorrei` instead of `voglio` is the difference between asking and demanding. It reuses the futuro's stems exactly, so if you know one, the other is just new endings.
Condizionale passato
The condizionale passato covers "would have", the outcome that never happened. It also handles something English does differently: reporting what someone said was going to happen. Italian uses the past conditional there, not the present one.
Imperativo
Practise them in order
Ciao Verbs sequences these tenses into a level path, so you're never asked for a form you haven't been taught. Typed answers, no multiple choice, works offline.
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