Italian Passive Voice: essere and venire With the Participle
By Michael McGettrickUpdated 27 September 2026
Italian and English build the passive voice the same way in outline, an auxiliary plus a participle, but Italian adds two things English does not have: a second auxiliary option, , and a participle that changes its ending to match the subject. Neither is difficult once you have seen it laid out, and the passive turns up constantly in Italian news, signs and instructions, so recognising it fast matters more than most learners expect.
This page covers the passive voice as it appears on the Pearson Edexcel GCSE Italian specification (1IN0): the present tense at Foundation and Higher, and the wider pattern, other tenses and , at Higher only.
What the passive does
An active sentence puts the doer first: Maria , Maria writes the book. A passive sentence puts the thing done to first, and moves the doer, if it is mentioned at all, into a phrase with :
Maria. - Maria writes the book. (active)
èMaria. - The book is written by Maria. (passive)
English speakers already know when to reach for this: when the thing done to something matters more than who did it, or when the doer is unknown, obvious, or beside the point. Italian uses the passive for exactly the same reasons.
Building it: essere plus the participle
The core pattern is , conjugated in whichever tense the sentence needs, plus the past participle of the main verb:
è. - The shop is open every day.
èMarco. - The letter is written by Marco.
Ionline. - The tickets are sold online.
Nothing here is new machinery: you have already met every past participle in Italian past participles, and conjugates exactly as it does everywhere else. The one habit to build is agreement.
The participle always agrees with the subject
Because is the auxiliary, the participle behaves like an adjective and matches the subject in gender and number, the same rule that governs in the passato prossimo:
| subject | participle ( |
|---|---|
| |
| |
i | |
| |
è. - The book is written.
. - The letters are written.
Get the noun's gender and number right and the participle simply follows; there is no separate rule to learn on top of what past participles and essere and avere already cover.
Saying who did it: da
introduces the agent, the person or thing that carried out the action, exactly where English uses by:
èdipinto. - The painting is painted by a famous artist.
è. - This museum is visited by many tourists.
The agent phrase is entirely optional, and Italian, like English, drops it whenever the doer does not matter or is not known: è , the shop is closed, with nobody blamed or credited for closing it.
Venire as an alternative auxiliary
In simple tenses only (present, imperfect, future, conditional and so on), can stand in for :
. - The door is closed at six.
I. - The tickets will be sold tomorrow.
The two are close in meaning, and both are correct Italian, but there is a genuine shade of difference. describes more of a state, the result of the action, while leans towards the action itself as an event unfolding:
è. - The shop is open. (a state, it is currently open)
. - The shop gets opened at nine. (an event, the act of opening)
has one hard limit worth remembering for the exam: it cannot appear in compound tenses. There is no venire stato aperto. Where a compound tense is needed, is the only option.
The future passive
The future tense follows the same rule as any other simple tense: conjugate (or ) in the future, add the agreeing participle:
esaminata. - The application will be examined tomorrow.
I. - The tickets will be sold tomorrow.
Nothing new to learn beyond conjugating the auxiliary correctly; the participle behaves exactly as it does everywhere else on this page.
Andare plus the participle: a passive of obligation
One further construction is close enough to the passive to be worth flagging here, even though it carries an extra layer of meaning. , conjugated, plus a past participle states that something must be or should be done, a passive built from to go rather than to be:
. - The application must be signed by Friday.
. - This rule must be respected.
plus the participle simply reports a fact or an event; plus the participle adds obligation on top, roughly needs to be rather than plain is. The participle agrees with the subject exactly as it does with , and in this obligation sense the construction only works in simple tenses, mirroring the limit on . One exception to watch for in reading: with verbs of losing and destroying, plus the participle is a plain passive with no obligation at all, and it does appear in compound tenses: è , the book got lost.
The passive in compound tenses
In the passato prossimo and other compound tenses, doubles up: once as the passive auxiliary, once as the auxiliary that builds the compound tense itself, giving è plus the participle:
èdipinto. - The painting was painted yesterday.
è. - The house was sold last week.
I. - The messages were written by a friend.
Both parts agree with the subject: becomes , or state exactly as does. It looks like a lot of agreement stacked up, but it is the same single rule applied twice, not two separate rules.
Recognising it against a straight adjective
One trap worth naming early: è can describe a simple state (the shop is open, adjective) or, with an agent added, a passive event ( è Marco, the shop is opened by Marco). Context and the presence of usually settle which reading is meant, and it rarely causes real confusion in practice, but it explains why in the passive can feel, at first glance, exactly like plus an ordinary adjective. That is not a coincidence: the participle genuinely is functioning as an adjective in both cases.
The passive versus si: which one Italians actually say
Italian has a second way of hiding the doer, the impersonal covered in Italian reflexive verbs, and in everyday speech it beats the true passive most of the time when the agent is not mentioned at all:
. - English is spoken here.
L'è. - English is spoken here.
Both are correct, but the second sounds like a translation from English rather than something an Italian would say first. The true passive with or earns its keep in exactly the cases cannot cover: whenever the agent is named with , and in formal registers, news reports and written instructions, where the passive is entirely standard and often preferred. è dipinto has no natural version, because cannot introduce an agent phrase at all. Recognising which tool the sentence in front of you is reaching for, agent named or not, formal or casual, is more useful for GCSE reading than a rule that says one is always better.
Mistakes English speakers make
Forgetting the agreement. è , leaving the participle masculine when the subject is feminine. Match the ending to the subject, every time, in every tense.
Using per instead of for the agent. Per Marco for by Marco is wrong; the passive agent is always .
Reaching for in a compound tense. does not exist. Compound tenses use , no exceptions.
Overusing the passive where Italian prefers . Translating every English passive literally produces correct but stilted Italian in places where a native speaker would use the impersonal : sounds far more natural than a passive equivalent for English is spoken here.
Confusing the passive with a description. Treating every plus participle as passive, even when there is no action and no possible agent, è , the coffee is cold, which is a plain adjective, not a passive verb at all.
Mixing up 's two meanings. plus a participle states obligation ( , must be signed); plain on its own is only ever the verb to go. Context, and the participle sitting right after it, tells them apart; (got lost) is the one common case where the participle brings no obligation.
What to practise
Start by rewriting five active sentences as passives, moving the object to the front and adjusting the participle's ending each time: Maria becomes è Maria. Once that move is automatic, drill the / choice in the present tense, since that is where GCSE questions concentrate, and only then move to the compound è pattern. The Italian course puts these sentences into fuller context, and Italian reflexive verbs is the natural next stop for the impersonal , which does a similar job in everyday speech and is worth comparing directly against what you have just learned here.