The Passato Remoto Tense in Italian

Or: How to Relax in the Midst of Grammatical Chaos

If you’re here reading this, you’ve probably “learned” the passato remoto tense in school… but you were confused on how to actually use it because — and I say this with a lot of love — it’s a beautiful train wreck of a tense.

Irregular conjugations are bouncing all over the walls (brimming with caffeine, no doubt) and evading you before you can figure out how to use them.

But there’s good and not-so-good news here.

Let’s deliver the good news first. Typically, you only have to use the passato remoto when talking about things that happened a looooooong time ago, like the birth of Shakespeare or the {sniff sniff} death of John Lennon in 1980.

The not–so-hot news?

If you adore spending time in the south of Italy, you have quite the beast to tackle if you want to sound more like the locals.

You’ll hear the passato remoto used in areas of southern Italy like Puglia, Salento, Sicily, and Calabria, in reference to events that happened weeks instead of years ago. That means you’re going to be hearing the passato remoto a lot sans dictionary or convenient conjugation chart in hand.

COMUNQUE, know that using the passato remoto to talk about events in the recent past is grammatically incorrect, so I will leave the decision to follow suit or stand your grammatical ground up to you.

In my experience, I’ve never focused much on the passato remoto because I spend more time in the center of Italy and I can notice it when I read it. That being said, it’s required for the C1 and C2 CILS exams, so if you’re planning on taking those, it’s a must-know.

Depending on where you fall, here’s what you need to know about the tense.

When to use it

Like I mentioned briefly, you use the passato remoto when you want to: