Italian Conditional: Would, Should and the Polite Request

The Italian conditional is the tense of would, and it is far more useful than its place at the back of most textbooks suggests. It is how Italians order a coffee, give advice, turn down an invitation without offence and talk about a life they are not living. The good news is that it is almost free: if you know the future tense, you already know the stems, and there is just one new set of endings to learn.

How the Italian conditional is formed

Take the future stem and add the conditional endings. For regular verbs the stem is the infinitive without its final -e, and -are verbs change their a to e on the way:

Six endings, identical across all three verb families. That is the whole regular conditional. The -are verbs becoming parler- rather than parlar- is the only thing that catches people out, and it is the same change the future makes, so you only learn it once.

Two spelling adjustments protect the sound rather than change the pattern. Verbs in -care and -gare add an h to keep the hard c and g: cercherei (I would look for), pagherei (I would pay). Verbs in -ciare and -giare drop the i, because the e already softens the consonant: mangerei (I would eat).

The irregular stems are the future's irregular stems

Every verb with an irregular future has the same irregular stem in the conditional. There are no new irregulars to learn here, which makes this one of the cheapest tenses in Italian:

Notice the patterns inside the list. Several verbs simply lose a vowel (andr-, potr-, dovr-, sapr-, vedr-, vivr-), and a few swap a consonant into a double r (vorr-, verr-, berr-). Fare, dare, stare and dire keep their a or i instead of switching to e. Learn the future and the conditional together and you learn every one of these stems once, for two tenses.

Use one: asking politely

This is the conditional you will use first and most. Italian treats a bare present-tense request as blunt, and the conditional is how it softens one:

Vorrei un caffè, per favore. - I would like a coffee, please.

Potrebbe aiutarmi? - Could you help me?

Avresti un minuto? - Would you have a minute?

The difference between voglio and vorrei is exactly the difference between I want and I'd like. Both are correct Italian. Only one is what a polite adult says to a stranger behind a counter. If you take a single form away from this page, make it vorrei, because it opens nearly every transaction you will have in Italy.

Mi piacerebbe is the other polite workhorse, the conditional of piacere, and it covers I would like to followed by a verb:

Mi piacerebbe vedere Parigi. - I would like to see Paris.

Potrebbe with Lei is the formal register; potresti with tu is the informal one. Both are more polite than puoi, which is fine among friends and slightly abrupt anywhere else.

Use two: advice and should

English builds should from a separate word. Italian takes dovere and puts it in the conditional, which gives advice exactly the right amount of softness:

Dovresti dormire di più. - You should sleep more.

Non dovrei mangiare questo. - I shouldn't eat this.

Devi would be you must, an instruction. Dovresti is a suggestion the other person is free to ignore, which is usually what you mean.

Italians also give advice with a small set phrase that is worth memorising whole:

Al tuo posto, parlerei con lui. - In your place, I would talk to him.

And the conditional hedges your own opinions. Direi di sì (I'd say so) and Non saprei (I wouldn't know) are two of the commonest things you will hear in conversation, and both are conditional precisely because they make a claim sound less final. Non saprei in particular is the polite Italian way of saying no idea.

Use three: the if sentence

The conditional gives the result of an unreal situation. The condition itself goes in the imperfect subjunctive:

Se avessi tempo, andrei al mare. - If I had time, I would go to the seaside.

Se fossi in te, non lo farei. - If I were you, I wouldn't do it.

Here is the structure laid out, because the two halves are not interchangeable:

The order can flip, Andrei al mare se avessi tempo, but the tenses stay attached to their halves. The subjunctive side has its own article; for now, se avessi and se fossi will carry you a long way, because if I had and if I were are the two conditions people actually express most.

The conditional can also stand without any if clause at all, when the condition is understood:

Sarebbe meglio aspettare. - It would be better to wait.

Che cosa faresti? - What would you do?

The past conditional: would have

To say would have, put avere or essere in the conditional and add a past participle. The choice of auxiliary follows exactly the same rule as the passato prossimo, and so does the agreement:

Avrei fatto lo stesso. - I would have done the same.

Sarei andato, ma ero stanco. - I would have gone, but I was tired.

Avrei dovuto chiamare. - I should have called.

Avrei dovuto deserves attention on its own. It is Italian's should have, and it is the natural way to express regret, or to tell someone else what they got wrong: Avresti dovuto dirmelo, you should have told me.

The reported conditional: allegedly

Italian newspapers and news bulletins use the conditional for something English needs an extra word for. When a claim has not been confirmed, the conditional marks it as reported rather than asserted:

Secondo la polizia, l'uomo sarebbe ancora in città. - According to the police, the man is reportedly still in the city.

That sarebbe is not would be. It is the journalist keeping their distance, the equivalent of allegedly or is said to be. Once you know it exists you will see it in every Italian news story, and without knowing it you will mistranslate half of them.

Future or conditional: one letter apart

Because the two tenses share a stem, some forms differ by a single letter. The most important pair is the noi form:

The conditional has a double m, and the double consonant is genuinely pronounced longer. Say parleremo when you mean parleremmo and you have promised to do something rather than speculated about it. The Italian future tense covers the other half of the pair.

Mistakes English speakers make

Using the conditional after se. Se avrei tempo is wrong. The if half takes the subjunctive, se avessi, and the conditional belongs only to the result. Italian children are corrected on this at school, so it marks you as careless rather than foreign, which is arguably worse.

Using the simple conditional for a future in the past. English says he said he would come and uses a plain would. Italian uses the past conditional: Ha detto che sarebbe venuto. Ha detto che verrebbe sounds wrong to an Italian, and this one survives in otherwise fluent learners for years, because nothing in English warns you about it.

Ordering with voglio. Correct, clear and faintly rude. Switch to vorrei and nobody has to forgive you anything.

Forgetting the double m. Parleremmo, not parleremo, when you mean would. It is one letter on the page and a real difference in sound.

Translating every would as a conditional. English also uses would for habits in the past: every summer we would go to the seaside. That is not a conditional at all in Italian; it is the imperfetto, because it describes what used to happen.

Using potere where English has could for the past. I couldn't come yesterday is a past fact, not a hypothetical, so it takes the passato prossimo, non sono potuto venire (the form grammars traditionally prefer) or non ho potuto venire (just as common, and also accepted), not the conditional.

What to practise

Start with the polite forms, because they pay off the first time you walk into a bar: vorrei, potrebbe, mi piacerebbe, until each comes out without thinking. Then add dovresti for advice and non saprei as your default hedge. Once those are automatic, build a few if sentences with se avessi and se fossi, and pay attention to the tense you put after se. After that, the natural next step is the Italian imperative, which is the blunt end of the same scale of politeness, and the Italian course drills the conditional on real sentences.