Radio Arlecchino

Today’s episode, Pulcinella Plugged, will explain the last two tenses in our past tense trilogy, the trapassato prossimo and the trapassato remoto. The function of the trapassato prossimo is to put actions in the right chronological order: to report actions that happened further back in the past than other past tenses. It’s the most past of all the past tenses.

Like the passato remoto, the trapassato remoto is a tense used in literature and narrative writing. It is very similar to the trapassato prossimo in that it is used to refer to a past action that was completed before another action in the past. You’ll almost never hear it in conversation.

Let’s listen now as Pulcinella tells us about his new CD!

PODCAST LINK: Episode 3

Today’s episode, Great Caesar’s Ghost, will help you understand the passato remoto: a simple, one-word, past tense that, just like the passato prossimo, is used to report completed actions or changes in states in the past. While the passato prossimo is used for the ‘recent’ past, the passato remoto is used to talk about actions that took place in a relatively distant, or ‘remote’ past.

In contemporary Italian, the passato remoto has become a literary tense. You will find it in fairy tales, short stories, and novels – and describing historical events in non-fiction biographies, histories, and encyclopedia articles.

Let’s listen as Arlecchina and Arlecchina and Colombina talk to the coliseum cats, the ghosts of Roman emperors

PODCAST LINK: Episode 2