Avere (to have): Italian grammar lesson

Why is it so important the verb avere in Italian?

Avere translates to the obvious uses of ownership and possession for example, to have a sister or a cat, or a house, or a doubt, or a cold.

It can also translate in English to such things as to get, to have received a package, say, or news, and to hold a memory dear, for example.

In addition, it has a long list of daily uses beyond the obvious parallel ones in English: to be right or wrong, to be cold or scared.

It is also one of the two auxiliary verbs in Italian. The other being essere (to be).

This means that avere is also used to help conjugate transitive verbs (with a direct object) to form compound tenses.

Think of all verbs whose action has an object outside of the subject, like mangiare (to eat), baciare (to kiss), bere (to drink), vedere (to see), scrivere (to write), fare (to do), amare (to love).

However, transitive and intransitive verbs do not match exactly in English and Italian.

This makes avere one of the most important verbs in the Italian language and that’s why you should learn its conjugations in Italian.

How to conjugate avere?

Avere is not a regular verb in all tenses. Therefore, it does not have a fixed pattern nor does it have the same suffixes that are used for regular verbs.

Present tense

In English, you’re hungry. In Italian, you have hunger.

So, you need to learn the present tense of the verb avere (to have).

Here is the verb conjugation:

Let’s look at some simple sentences with avere meaning to have in Italian:

In Italian, you can leave out the personal pronoun in front unless you want it for emphasis or clarity.

Past tense 

The most used past tense in Italian grammar is the passato prossimo.

The present perfect tense of avere is formed by the present simple of it + its past participle: avuto.

In English it can be translated as had or have had.

Future tense

The conjugation of the Italian future tense (futuro semplice) of avere corresponds to the English will have or going to have.

Here are some examples of the future tense of avere:

There are many other instances where Italian speakers use have, instead of be. For example, you can also have thirst, sleepiness, hotness, and coldness.

Here are some more sentences:

Avere can also be used for expressing hunger:

How does avere is pronunced in Italian?

As you might have noticed, there is an H.

The reason is that this verb was spelled with an H in Latin (Habere) as it still is in English, have.

As Italian evolved, it lost the use of H for most words, and, as you know, now H is always silent.

The reason avere still has H in some of its forms is purely for disambiguation.

You see, in Italian, we have the following words:

• o (or)
• ai (to the)
• a (to)
• anno (year)

And it would be very unclear if these words also meant:

• I have
• You have
• He/she has
• They have

For this reason, we kept the H in those forms but you don’t need to remember this bit of information.

What you do have to remember is which forms of the present tense have the H and which ones don’t (noi and voi are the only forms without the H).

Avere: examples

In English, you have breakfast, a bath, a shower, a nap, a cigarette, a coffee, etc.

In Italian, you don’t use avere for those things. We use it mainly to refer to possession. Remember this when you speak Italian!

Let’s take a look at some more examples of how to use avere:

Avere is also needed to talk about your age as in Italian, we are not an age but we have years of age.

Other Italian verbs such as  prendere (to take) or fare (to do, to make) have the meaning of to have in English:

Learn more about Italian verb conjugation here.