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È grandinato improvvisamente e abbiamo visto un fulmine spaventoso.

È grandinato improvvisamente e abbiamo visto un fulmine spaventoso.
It hailed suddenly and we saw a scary lightning bolt.
From Lesson 296:Auxiliaries for weather verbs (essere, avere)·Italian

Breakdown of È grandinato improvvisamente e abbiamo visto un fulmine spaventoso.

un
a / an (masculine)
e
and
vedere
to see
improvvisamente
suddenly
spaventoso
scary
grandinare
to hail
il fulmine
the lightning bolt

Questions & Answers about È grandinato improvvisamente e abbiamo visto un fulmine spaventoso.

Why does the sentence say È grandinato instead of Ha grandinato?
For meteorological verbs like grandinare (to hail), piovere (to rain), and nevicare (to snow), Italian is unusually flexible! You can use either essere or avere as the helping verb in the past tense. Both è grandinato and ha grandinato are perfectly correct and mean the exact same thing.
If we use essere for è grandinato, shouldn't the ending change to agree with the subject?
Usually, yes! When a verb uses essere, its past participle agrees with the subject. However, weather verbs are impersonal—they don't have a real subject (the 'it' in 'it hailed' isn't a specific person or thing). Because there is no noun to agree with, the ending defaults to the masculine singular -o.
Why is improvvisamente placed right after the verb? Can I put it at the start of the sentence?
While you can put it at the beginning for dramatic effect, placing adverbs that end in -mente right after the verb they modify is the most natural and common word order in Italian.
How is the word spaventoso formed?
It comes from the noun spavento (fright or terror). The suffix -oso works a lot like the English '-ous' or '-y', turning a noun into an adjective. So, a lightning bolt that causes spavento becomes spaventoso (scary or frightening).

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