Guardare: Full Conjugation

Guardare (to watch, to look at) is a fully regular first-conjugation verb and one of the most-used perception verbs in Italian. You watch films, you look at photos, you keep an eye on the kids, you peek out the window, you give someone a stern glance — all guardare. The verb has no conjugation surprises whatsoever: every tense and mood is built on the predictable stem guard- with standard -are endings.

The pedagogically central fact about guardare is not its paradigm but its contrast with vedere (to see). Italian draws the same intentional/involuntary line that English draws between look at and see: vedere is what your eyes do automatically — perception that happens to you — while guardare is what you do on purpose — perception you direct. Vedo l'autobus che arriva (I see the bus coming, it's just there in my visual field). Guardo il telegiornale (I watch the news, I'm directing my attention to it). Mastering this distinction is one of the most useful things an A1 learner can do, because it generalises immediately to the parallel pair sentire / ascoltare (hear / listen).

Etymologically, guardare comes from a Germanic root: Frankish wardōn (to watch over, to guard) entered Vulgar Latin and gave Old Italian guardare with the typical Romance gw- substitution for Germanic w-. The original sense of "guarding, keeping watch" is still alive in cognates like English guard and ward, and survives in idioms such as guardarsi da (to be wary of, to guard oneself against). This Germanic origin sets guardare apart from most perception verbs in Italian, which descend from Latin.

Indicativo presente

The orthographic note worth flagging: the gu- in guardare is pronounced /ɡw/, a hard g with a w glide. It is not the silent gu of guerra /ˈɡwɛrra/ before e, nor the silent u you'd see in some other Romance languages. In Italian, gu before a, o almost always carries the /w/ sound.

Imperfetto

Standard -are imperfect endings. Guardare is one of the verbs you'll hear most often in the imperfetto, because watching is a paradigmatic ongoing or habitual activity: guardavo la TV quando è suonato il telefono (I was watching TV when the phone rang).

Passato remoto

Fully regular -are passato remoto. The 3sg guardò carries an obligatory grave accent on the final -ò; without it, you've written nothing. The double mm in guardammo marks the noi of the passato remoto and distinguishes it from the present guardiamo.

Futuro semplice

Regular future built from the modified infinitive stem guarder- + standard endings. As with all -are verbs, the thematic a of the infinitive shifts to e before the future endings (guardare → guarder-). The 1sg guarderò and 3sg guarderà take obligatory grave accents.

Condizionale presente

Watch the double m in guarderemmo (conditional) versus single-m guarderemo (future) — the same single-m / double-m trap that haunts every Italian conditional.

Congiuntivo presente

Standard -are subjunctive: the three singular forms collapse into guardi (which is also identical to the indicative tu — context disambiguates). The noi form guardiamo also matches the indicative.

Congiuntivo imperfetto

Imperativo

The imperative guarda! ("look!") is one of the highest-frequency commands in spoken Italian — used both literally ("look at this!") and as a discourse marker meaning "listen, here's the thing…": guarda, te lo dico chiaro ("look, let me tell you straight"). Negative tu uses non + infinitive: non guardare (don't look), never non guardi.

Forme non finite

The participle guardato is fully regular. The gerund guardando combines with stare for the progressive: sto guardando un film ("I'm watching a film").

Compound tenses (auxiliary: avere)

Guardare is transitive and takes avere. The participle stays invariable unless a direct-object pronoun precedes the verb, in which case it agrees with that pronoun in gender and number.

Guardare vs vedere — the central distinction

This is the contrast that does the heavy lifting. Italian, like English, draws a sharp line between involuntary perception and directed attention.

The pairs below show the contrast in action. Read each pair side by side:

For watching things on a screen — TV, films, videos — guardare is the default: guardo la TV, guardo Netflix, guardo un film. Vedere is also possible there but means something subtly different: ho visto quel film often means "I've seen it" in the experiential sense ("I'm familiar with it"), while l'ho guardato emphasises the act of viewing it (perhaps yesterday, with full attention). At the cinema, the standard collocation is vedere un film — because the experience involves perceiving it as a whole event, not the active surveillance implied by guardare. Both are correct; native speakers slide between them.

For a fuller treatment, see Vedere vs guardare.

Reflexive: guardarsi

The reflexive guardarsi ("to look at oneself, to be wary") takes essere in compound tenses. It has two main uses:

1. Literal reflexive — to look at oneself:

2. Idiomatic — guardarsi da — to be wary of, to beware of:

The guardarsi da construction preserves the original Germanic sense of wardōn (to keep watch, to guard against). It's the only place in modern Italian where you can still hear the etymology breathing.

Idiomatic uses

Guardare sits inside a rich constellation of fixed expressions and discourse markers. The most useful for everyday speech:

• guardare in cagnesco — to glare, to give a hostile look (literally "to look in dog-fashion")
• guardare di traverso — to look askance, to give the side-eye
• guardare con la coda dell'occhio — to look out of the corner of one's eye
• guardare dall'alto in basso — to look down on (someone), to be condescending
• guardare di buon occhio / di cattivo occhio — to view favourably / unfavourably
• guarda guarda! — well, well! (surprise, recognition)
• guarda che… — look, the thing is… (discourse marker introducing a counter-point)
• guarda un po'! — would you look at that!
• guardare il dito invece della luna — to miss the point (lit. to look at the finger pointing at the moon instead of the moon itself)
• stare a guardare — to stand idly by, to watch without acting

Common mistakes

Key takeaways

1. Fully regular -are verb. No conjugation surprises. Stem guard- throughout, future and conditional on guarder-.

2. Direct object, no preposition. Guardo la TV, guardo te, guardo i bambini. Never guardare a or guardare alla.

3. Guardare = directed perception, vedere = involuntary perception. This is the same line English draws between look at / watch and see. Internalise the contrast through pairs: vedo (it's just there) versus guardo (I'm watching it on purpose).

4. Reflexive guardarsi has a literal sense (look at oneself) and the high-frequency idiomatic guardarsi da (to beware of) — preserving the verb's original Germanic "guard" sense.

5. Guarda! is one of the most-used discourse markers in spoken Italian — both literal ("look!") and figurative ("look, the thing is…").

The companion verb you must drill alongside guardare is vedere. Memorising the pair as a contrast — guardo / vedo, ho guardato / ho visto, guarderò / vedrò — locks in both verbs and the perception distinction at once.