Weather Verbs (Impersonal)

Weather is one of the first things any beginner learns to talk about, and Italian handles it differently from English in a way worth pausing on. English requires a dummy subject — it is raining, it is snowing, it is hot — because every English sentence needs a subject in front of the verb. Italian has no such requirement. The verb simply conjugates in the third person singular and there is no overt subject at all. Piove. That's a complete sentence: "It's raining."

This page covers the four ways Italian expresses weather: impersonal verbs (piove, nevica), the fa + noun pattern, the c'è + noun pattern, and the è + adjective pattern. Each handles a different slice of the weather vocabulary.

True weather verbs (piove, nevica, ...)

A small set of Italian verbs are inherently impersonal: they exist only in the third person singular and have no logical subject. They name a weather event directly.

There is no subject pronoun, ever — saying esso piove would be ungrammatical. The verb stands alone, or with adverbs of time and degree.

The auxiliary question: avere or essere?

When weather verbs go into compound tenses, both avere and essere are accepted by educated Italians, with a soft tendency:

• avere dominates in everyday speech: ha piovuto, ha nevicato
• essere is favored in traditional prescriptive grammar: è piovuto, è nevicato

You'll hear both from native speakers. In writing, both pass without comment. Older grammar manuals defend essere as the historically correct choice (because the verb describes an event affecting the world, not an action performed by an agent), while modern usage has drifted toward avere by analogy with other impersonal events.

Fa + weather noun: general weather state

For describing the general feel of the weather — temperature, pleasantness, ugliness — Italian uses fare in the 3rd person singular plus a noun. This is not literally "it does heat"; it's a fixed idiomatic structure that English translates with the verb to be.

Note the choice of preposition with intensifiers: fa molto caldo (very hot), fa un freddo cane (literally "it makes a dog-cold," = freezing cold — a common idiom), fa un caldo da morire (it's hot enough to die).

C'è + weather noun: presence of a feature

When the weather involves a specific feature you can point to — sun, fog, wind, clouds — Italian uses c'è ("there is") plus the noun. This corresponds to English "it's sunny / foggy / windy," but the Italian frame is "there is sun / fog / wind."

The article use is variable: c'è il sole with the article (the most natural form), but c'è vento without one (because vento is treated as a mass noun here). Both patterns occur; the article is mandatory with sole, luna, nebbia and absent with vento, foschia.

È + adjective: describing the sky or atmosphere

For sky-condition adjectives — clear, cloudy, stormy — Italian uses the verb essere in the 3rd person singular plus the adjective. There is no subject; the construction parallels the impersonal weather verbs.

The big picture: no expletive subject

The conceptual point that ties all four constructions together is that Italian does not use a dummy "it" subject for weather. English needs it — it is raining, it is hot, it is sunny — because English grammar requires every finite verb to have an overt subject. Italian doesn't. The verb conjugates in 3sg and that's the entire sentence.

English speakers often try to insert a phantom subject — esso piove, lui fa freddo — and these sound completely wrong. There is no subject. Don't supply one.

Common mistakes

Key takeaways

Italian weather expressions split into four constructions, each tied to a specific kind of weather vocabulary:

1. Impersonal verbs for precipitation events: piove, nevica, grandina, tuona. No subject; verb in 3sg.
2. Fa + noun for general feel: fa caldo, fa freddo, fa bel tempo.
3. C'è + noun for visible features: c'è il sole, c'è la nebbia, c'è vento.
4. È + adjective for sky conditions: è sereno, è nuvoloso, è coperto.

For other impersonal constructions in Italian, see si impersonale and bisogna, or jump to the complete impersonal verbs reference for a side-by-side comparison.