As the examples con fi rm, the ‘passato prossimo’ may correspond to either the simple past or the present perfect in English. But there are also other di ff er- ences between the Italian and English structures: there is only one auxiliary verb in English (‘to have’), but in Italian there is a choice of two,  avere  and essere ; when  essere  is used, the past participle has to agree in gender and number with the subject;  fi nally, whether to use  avere  or  essere  is not usually a free  choice. We will look at all these di ff erences in detail, but  fi rst we need to look at the forms of the Italian past participle. Unit 12 85 3 The regular forms of the past participle are obtained by changing the ending of the in fi nitive as follows: * Verbs ending in  -cere  (or  -scere ) keep the ‘soft’ sound of  c  (or  sc ) and therefore add an  i  before the  -uto  ending ( -iuto ). The past participle of verbs in  -urre  ends in  -otto : In fi nitive condurre tradurre produrre Past participle condotto tradotto prodotto (to lead/drive/manage) led/driven/managed (to translate) translated (to produce) produced In fi nitive in  -are -ato In fi nitive in  -ere -uto In fi nitive in  -ire -ito In fi nitive parlare mangiare cadere volere piacere conoscere partire capire Past participle parl ato mangi ato cad uto vol uto piac iuto * conosc iuto * part ito cap ito (to speak) spoken (to eat) eaten (to fall) fallen (to want) wanted (to like) liked (to know/meet for the  fi rst time) known/met (to leave) left (to understand) understood Forms of the past participle