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As the examples con fi rm, the ‘passato prossimo’ may correspond to either the simple past or the present perfect in English. But there are also other di ff er- ences between the Italian and English structures: there is only one auxiliary verb in English (‘to have’), but in Italian there is a choice of two, avere  and essere ; when essere  is used, the past participle has to agree in gender and number with the subject; fi nally, whether to use avere  or essere  is not usually a free  choice. We will look at all these di ff erences in detail, but fi rst we need to look at the forms of the Italian past participle. 

## Forms of the past participle 

3 The regular forms of the past participle are obtained by changing the ending of the in fi nitive as follows: 

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* Verbs ending in -cere  (or -scere ) keep the ‘soft’ sound of c  (or sc ) and therefore add an i  before the -uto  ending ( -iuto ). 

The past participle of verbs in -urre  ends in -otto : 

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