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## UNIT TWELVE The present perfect tense 

## Use of the present perfect 

1 The present perfect (‘passato prossimo’) is one of the two most used past tenses of the indicative in Italian (the other is the imperfect (‘imperfetto’)). The present perfect is often used like the English present perfect (e.g. ‘I have seen  it’, ‘She has gone  home’) to state that an action has happened in the past, but that its e ff ects are still lasting in the present. However, in Northern Italy and in the language of the media, it is also equivalent to the English simple past (e.g. ‘I saw  it’, ‘She went  home’), referring to actions which happened in a more distant past and have no immediate consequences in the present. Indeed, it more often corresponds to the English simple past than to the English present perfect. In other words, in Italian, the di ff erence between present perfect (‘passato prossimo’) and simple past (‘passato remoto’) is not always marked, and it is always possible to use the former: 

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2 The present perfect is a compound tense and is formed, as in English, with the present tense of the auxiliary verb followed by the past participle of the verb: 

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