avviò

Avviò is the third-person singular form in the passato remoto of the Italian verb avviare, which means to start, to launch, or to initiate. The passato remoto is a literary past tense used primarily in formal writing to recount events that are perceived as distant in time.

In contemporary Italian the common past tense is the passato prossimo, as in ha avviato. Therefore avviò appears mainly in literature, historical works, or formal journalism and is rarely used in everyday speech. The form avviò is written with a double v and carries the stress on the final syllable, as indicated by the acute accent on the o. It is used with third-person singular subjects, for example: egli avviò.

Conjugation in the passato remoto for avviare (illustrative forms): io avviai, tu avviasti, egli avviò, noi avviammo, voi avviaste, essi avviarono. The corresponding infinitive is avviare, and other tenses use related stems, but avviò specifically marks the historical past in the third-person singular.

Etymology and usage notes: avviare comes from a formation built around the base via (road, way) with a prefix that conveys initiation or setting onto a path. The sense of avviare extends to starting a process, a project, or an operation. Avviò, as a distantly placed past form, is typical in narratives that seek to convey events with a historical or literary distance, rather than in standard contemporary narration.

Examples: Nel 1985, l’ente avviò un’indagine su diverse pratiche. Durante la campagna, l’esercito avviò una manovra su larga scala. Such uses remain rooted in formal or historical contexts.