English Translation
He went to London a month ago.
This tense confuses me in general. Is it commonly used in everyday speaking? Also, given only a month has passed, would it even make sense to use it here?
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Hi. I think the Passato Remoto is used more in the written word, in books, and refers to a completed action in the past that doesn’t involve anything to do with the present. I have to say reading helps a lot with the PR, as it doesn’t come as naturally as other tenses. Perhaps a madrelingua can tell us more about this sentence🖐.
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Well that was infuriating. I wrote an entire reply to that when I got a sudden red flash and WHOOMP, the whole reply vanished. Not cool.
As I was saying… it also depends on the region.
In writing, especially formal writing, it’s still pretty universal. (But seems to be less so in a lot of more modern business contracts, for example… in my experience anyway.)
In conversation it’s more common in the south, and also in Toscana probably because of the Dante connection. In the north in particular (Piemonte, Lombardia, even Lazio) it’s regarded as being a bit old fashioned and is falling out of use. I wish I could find something more definitive on this, but this article on the site of the Accademia della Crusca makes for interesting reading (albeit entirely in Italian, and not A1 level Italian either I’m afraid.)
I won’t use it. I always use the passato prossimo. (But then most of my contact is with Roma, Piemonte and Lombardia.) Also the most “formal” writing I do in Italian is captions on my photos, which I grant you do sometimes read like a chapter from a textbook. Others have different opinions. One is that it’s a more poetic form, which I won’t argue against. Another is that it is more concise because it does not require an auxiliary verb (much less remembering WHICH auxiliary verb!) which is true… but I would argue that the advantage is cancelled by needing to remember an extra verb form AND understanding the ethereal barrier between the prossimo and remoto, which is not an agreed barrier in each region. (Which ties back to what @Funnyhow asked; you can’t assume that the “remoto” is always objectively “remote” in time.)
An Italian student does need to know what the form is when they see it if they plan to read Italian as well as speak it, but unless you’re moving to, say, Sicilia I don’t think it needs to be studied intimately.
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Fantastic reply, mille grazie @LuciusVorenusX, very helpful indeed. Whenever I don’t recognise a verb I always think “Ah, remoto!” (I sympathise with the sudden whoomp, text gone… so frustrating:-/
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