Piovere: Impersonal Conjugation

Piovere (to rain) is the canonical Italian impersonal verb — a verb whose subject is the weather itself. There is no I rain or we rain; in its core meteorological meaning the verb only conjugates in the third-person singular: piove, pioveva, pioverà. The full paradigm exists in the dictionary, but you will hear and use only one row of every table.

What makes piovere exceptional even by impersonal-verb standards is its auxiliary flexibility: both essere and avere are accepted, and educated native speakers genuinely disagree about which is "more correct." Beyond the weather meaning, piovere has a vibrant figurative life — things rain down (applause, criticism, problems, gifts), and a chain of misfortunes is famously said to rain on the already-wet.

Indicativo presente

The dashes are deliberate: in its weather meaning, piovere simply has no first or second person. There is no piovo, no piovi, no piovono in normal conversation. (We will see below that figurative or literary usage occasionally licenses a third-person plural — piovevano applausi, "applause was raining down" — but those uses always have a non-meteorological subject and never extend to first or second person.)

The pronunciation deserves attention: the io is a true diphthong, /jɔ/, falling within a single syllable. Piove is two syllables (pjò-ve), not three. The vowel is open ɔ, the same sound as in cuore and uomo.

Imperfetto

The standard imperfect for the descriptive meteorological backdrop — pioveva quando sono uscito di casa ("it was raining when I left the house"). The imperfect of piovere is the single most useful form for storytelling, because rain in Italian narrative almost always sets atmosphere rather than constituting a discrete event.

Passato remoto

Piovve /ˈpjɔvve/ is irregular and worth lingering over. Italian inherited it from Latin pluit, but the modern form has acquired the diagnostic double consonant of the irregular passato remoto class — the same -vv- pattern you find in bere → bevve and the same gemination logic as scrivere → scrisse. The form is two syllables with a long, audible v; English speakers tend to underweight the gemination and produce a French-sounding piove /pjɔv/, which is wrong.

This form belongs to literary and historical Italian — accounts of the great floods, descriptions in nineteenth-century novels, weather records. In speech you will use the passato prossimo (ha piovuto or è piovuto) instead.

Futuro semplice

The grave accent on pioverà is mandatory — the verb is final-stressed in the future, and the accent carries the information. Pioverà domani ("It will rain tomorrow") is the standard weather-forecast register. The future also picks up the canonical "conjecture" reading: pioverà di sicuro stasera ("it's bound to rain tonight" — a guess, not a forecast).

Condizionale presente

Used in hypothetical sentences (se le nuvole fossero più scure, pioverebbe — "if the clouds were darker, it would rain") and in indirect-speech sequences (hanno detto che pioverebbe per tutta la settimana — "they said it would rain all week").

Congiuntivo presente

Piova appears after expressions of doubt, hope, fear, and necessity — credo che piova ("I think it's raining"), spero che non piova ("I hope it doesn't rain"), bisogna che piova presto ("we need it to rain soon"). Italian farmers and gardeners use this form constantly.

Congiuntivo imperfetto

The form for counterfactual conditionals — se piovesse, resteremmo in casa ("if it were raining, we'd stay home") — and for past-subjunctive complements: non sapevo che piovesse ("I didn't know it was raining").

Forme non finite

The participle piovuto is regular — the only quirk is that it is usually invariable in the impersonal usage (ha piovuto, è piovuto), since there is no real subject for it to agree with. In the figurative piovuto dal cielo construction it does agree with the noun it describes (una proposta piovuta dal cielo, regali piovuti dal cielo).

The gerund piovendo appears in subordinate clauses providing weather context: piovendo ininterrottamente da ore, la strada era allagata ("with the rain having fallen non-stop for hours, the road was flooded").

The auxiliary problem — essere or avere?

This is the single most distinctive feature of piovere's morphology, and one of the few places in modern Italian where the standard genuinely tolerates two answers. Both of the following are fully grammatical:

The two are not regional variants of one underlying form — they reflect a real divergence in how impersonal weather verbs were classed historically. The traditional rule, taught in older grammars, distinguished:

• Avere for sustained activity: ha piovuto per tre ore ("it rained for three hours")
• Essere for change of state, especially when a destination is implied: è piovuto sul tetto ("rain came down on the roof")

In practice this distinction has eroded almost completely. Modern usage has settled into a clear regional pattern:

The Accademia della Crusca's official position is that both are correct, with a slight modern preference for essere. For learners, the practical advice is: pick one and be consistent within a single text. If your model is a northern Italian speaker, you will hear è piovuto; if your model is a southern speaker or an older speaker, you will hear ha piovuto. Neither is wrong.

When piovere takes a real subject

There is one zone where piovere breaks the impersonal mold entirely: figurative usage, where the subject is not water but something else falling from above. In this construction, the verb fully conjugates — including the third-person plural — and behaves like an ordinary intransitive verb of motion.

In this figurative use the verb almost always takes essere, the auxiliary lines up with the participle's agreement (sono piovuti applausi, masculine plural), and the metaphor works exactly as in English: a sudden, abundant arrival of something from a metaphorical "above."

Idiomatic uses

The figurative range of piovere is one of the richest in the Italian verb system. The most established idioms:

• piovere a dirotto — to pour, to rain heavily
• piovere a catinelle — literally "to rain in basins" — to rain cats and dogs
• piovere a secchiate — "to rain in buckets" — same meaning, slightly more rural
• piovere sul bagnato — "to rain on the already-wet" — when it rains, it pours; bad luck compounding bad luck
• non ci piove — fixed idiom — "no doubt about it," "it's beyond question"
• piovuto dal cielo — "fallen from the sky" — said of unexpected good fortune (and occasionally of unexpected guests)
• Piove, governo ladro! — historic exclamation literally "It's raining, thieving government!" — a humorous expression of blaming the authorities for everything, dating from 19th-century anti-government cartoons

The noun pioggia

The noun corresponding to piovere is la pioggia (rain) — feminine, from Latin pluvia. Diminutives and augmentatives of pioggia form a delicate vocabulary of meteorological precision: pioggerella (a light shower, drizzle), piovasco (a sudden downpour), pioggia battente (driving rain), piovaschi sparsi (scattered showers — the language of weather forecasts). The verb and noun cooperate constantly: sotto la pioggia (in the rain), una pioggia di applausi (a shower of applause), una pioggia di critiche (a hail of criticism).

Etymology

Piovere descends from Latin pluere (to rain), with the same root producing French pleuvoir, Spanish llover, and Portuguese chover. At a deeper Indo-European level it is cognate with English flow and Greek plēin (to sail), from a root meaning "to flow, to swim." The Italian figurative usages — applause raining down, problems raining down — are not new metaphors but the original semantic field of the root reasserting itself.

Common mistakes

Key takeaways

1. Piovere is impersonal in its weather meaning: only the third-person singular forms exist in everyday use. There is no piovo, piovi, pioviamo in the meteorological sense.

2. The passato remoto is irregular: piovve /ˈpjɔvve/ — same -vv- gemination as bere → bevve, same morphological class as the irregular double-consonant -ere verbs.

3. Both essere and avere are accepted as auxiliary: è piovuto and ha piovuto are both correct. Northern speech and standard writing prefer essere; central and southern speech tilt toward avere; older grammars insist on avere. Pick one and stay consistent.

4. Figurative usage breaks the impersonal mold: when something other than rain is the subject — applause, criticism, problems, gifts — the verb fully conjugates and behaves normally. Piovevano applausi ("applause was pouring in") is fine; piovo in its weather sense is not.

5. The idiomatic life is rich: piove a catinelle, piove sul bagnato, piovuto dal cielo, non ci piove, and the famous mock-political piove, governo ladro! These belong on every learner's list.

For Italy's other major weather verb, see nevicare. For the broader auxiliary question, see auxiliary choice. The -vv- gemination of piovve belongs to the same class documented at irregular double-consonant passato remoto.