Italian literary tenses: narrative past and archaic forms

Written Italian narrative has its own tense system. In novels, short stories, biographies and history books the past is usually told with the passato remoto for the events that move the story forward, the imperfetto for the background, and the trapassato for what happened earlier still. Around this core, writers use the historic present, the narrative imperfect and the future in the past to control distance, speed and point of view.

This topic is about those uses, not about conjugation: the forms of the passato remoto, regular and irregular, have their own article, and so does the trapassato remoto. Here the questions are what each tense does in a narrative, how tense choice creates a narrative voice, and which older or elevated forms you will meet when you read literature written before the twentieth century.

At C2 the difference between recognising and producing matters. You should produce the narrative system yourself when you write a story or a historical account. Archaic forms such as «avea», «saria» or «fe’» are for recognition: you need to understand them in Manzoni, Leopardi or an opera libretto, not to use them in a modern email.

The narrative system: foreground, background, earlier past

In third-person literary narrative the passato remoto is the default tense of events. It presents each action as complete and closed, and so it carries the plot from one step to the next: «Marta entrò, posò la borsa e aprì la finestra». The imperfetto paints what surrounds those events: states, ongoing processes, repeated habits. «La stanza era fredda; fuori passavano i tram» does not move the story, it sets the stage. The trapassato prossimo steps back to a time before the current scene: «Aveva lasciato quella casa a vent’anni».

The passato remoto is chosen for narrative distance, not for remoteness in time. A story set last week can be told in the passato remoto, while a memoir about childhood can be told in the passato prossimo, which ties the events to the narrator’s present and is common in contemporary first-person fiction. Changing tense in the middle of a passage changes the narrator’s position, so do it deliberately, never by drift.

Outside fiction, the passato remoto lives on in encyclopedic and biographical writing («Dante nacque a Firenze nel 1265») and, as a regional feature, in the everyday speech of Tuscany and parts of southern Italy.

• Quando arrivammo alla stazione, il treno era già partito. · When we reached the station, the train had already left.
• Ogni sera il padre leggeva il giornale; quella sera, invece, lo gettò nel camino. · Every evening her father read the newspaper; that evening, though, he threw it into the fire.

Historic present and narrative imperfect

The historic present («presente storico») narrates past events in the present tense. It does not move the events into the present; it moves the reader into the scene. It is common in history writing and journalism («Nel 1860 Garibaldi sbarca a Marsala con i Mille») and in fiction at moments of tension. Once chosen, it should hold for the whole episode: events stay in the present, and anything earlier moves to the passato prossimo, as in «Marta apre la lettera che ha ricevuto il giorno prima».

The narrative imperfect («imperfetto narrativo») puts a single, completed event, which would ordinarily take the passato remoto, into the imperfetto: «Due anni dopo, moriva a Parigi», «Pochi minuti più tardi, i carabinieri arrestavano l’uomo». Instead of closing the event, the imperfetto stretches it into a scene, like a film slowing down at an important moment. Novelists use it for endings and climaxes; news reports use it so often that it has become a hallmark of crime and sports reporting.

Compare one event in two formulations. «Il 3 maggio la nave salpò da Genova» reports a fact in a sequence. «Il 3 maggio la nave salpava da Genova» frames the departure as a picture, inviting the reader to watch, and often signals that something important is about to happen.

• È la notte del 9 novembre 1989: a Berlino il muro comincia a cadere. · It is the night of 9 November 1989: in Berlin the Wall begins to fall.
• Tre giorni dopo, la polizia ritrovava l’auto in un parcheggio di periferia. · Three days later, the police found the car in a car park on the outskirts.

Tense and narrative voice: free indirect style

Tense is also how Italian narrative lets a character’s thoughts in without quotation marks. In free indirect style («discorso indiretto libero») the grammar stays in the narrator’s third person and past tenses, but the words, questions, exclamations and time references belong to the character. Giovanni Verga made it the signature of «I Malavoglia», and it remains central to modern Italian fiction.

Three formulations of one thought show the difference. Direct: «Marta pensò: “Domani parto e non torno più”». Indirect: «Marta pensò che il giorno dopo sarebbe partita e non sarebbe più tornata». Free indirect: «Domani sarebbe partita, e non sarebbe tornata mai più». The last keeps the narrator’s past framework, with the past conditional as future in the past, but uses the character’s «domani» instead of the narrator’s «il giorno dopo», and her emphatic «mai più».

Free indirect style has no reporting verb, so you identify it from clues: words anchored in the character’s here and now («ora», «domani», «qui»), evaluations she would make, questions and exclamations she would utter. Context decides. A question in the narrative could also belong to the narrator, and the reading remains an interpretation supported by evidence, not a certainty.

• Guardò l’orologio. Ancora dieci minuti, e poi? Poi avrebbe dovuto dirglielo. · She looked at the clock. Ten more minutes, and then? Then she would have to tell him.
• Non sapeva ancora che quella lettera gli avrebbe cambiato la vita. · He did not yet know that the letter would change his life.

Archaic and elevated forms: read them, rarely write them

Literature written before the twentieth century, poetry of every period and opera libretti use forms that modern prose has abandoned. The most frequent are imperfects without -v- («avea», «vedea», «sentia»), conditionals in -ia («saria», «avria», «potria»), shortened forms («fe’» for «fece», «diè» for «diede», «fur» for «furono», «amaron» for «amarono»), the first-person imperfect in -a («io era», «io aveva»), and pronouns now confined to literary use, such as «ella» for “she”.

A few survivals are still alive in fixed contexts. A pronoun attached to a conjugated verb, as in «dicesi» or «parvemi», sounds archaic in prose, yet signs still read «affittasi» and «vendesi». «Egli» and «esso» remain in formal and academic writing, although «lui» is now normal in most prose.

For your own writing, produce the modern narrative system and keep archaic forms for quotation, pastiche or parody. The trapassato remoto («ebbe finito», «fu uscita») is a borderline case: it is still correct in formal literary narrative, in time clauses after appena, non appena, dopo che or quando when the main clause is in the passato remoto, but in speech and most modern prose it gives way to «dopo aver finito» or to the trapassato prossimo.

• Ella non sapea che dire, e tacque. · She knew not what to say, and fell silent (archaic style).
• Affittasi appartamento in centro, piano terra. · Flat to let in the town centre, ground floor.