The fare causativo (or how to get someone to do what you want)

One of my favorite songs is La Notte by Salvatore Adamo:



In the song you will hear the following line:

La notte, tu mi fai impazzire.
(Night, you make me go crazy.)

This is a wonderful example of the fare causativo in Italian.  This is how you express the idea of

1. Making someone (or something) do an action. 
2. Making someone (or something) do an action to someone else (or something else) 

This is a very common construction, and you will see this all over the place, in both written and spoken Italian.

The fare causativo construction consists of 3 or 4 elements:

1. indirect object  +  
2. conjugated form of fare  +  
3. an infinitive  +
4. an optional direct object

1) The indirect object is always the person or thing that is going to do the action.  (This may be a indirect object pronoun (i.e. mi, ti, gli/le, ci, vi, gli) or disjunctive prepositional phrase (i.e. a me, a te, etc.)

Thus in our example from the song, because "me" is the thing that is going to do the action "go crazy", we need to list it as an indirect object pronoun...thus mi fai impazzire.

2) The conjugated form of fare determines the person (or thing) that is the prime instigator of the action.  So in the case of our example text, "Night, you make me go crazy"...the instigator of "making me go crazy" is "you" (referring to "Night").  Therefore, the conjugated form of fare has to be fai.

And don't forget, the conjugated form of fare can be in any tense.  So you could also have any of the following:

• mi hai fatto impazzire  
  (passato prossimo: You made me go crazy)
• mi facevi impazzire   
  (imperfetto: You used to make me go crazy)
• mi avevi fatto impazzire   
  (trapassato: You had made me go crazy)
• mi facesti impazzire   
  (passato remoto: you made me go crazy (a looooong time ago))
• mi faccia impazzire   
  (pres. subjunctive: you might make me go crazy) 
• mi facessi impazzire   
  (imp. subjunctive: you might have made me go crazy)
• mi faresti impazzire   
  (conditional: you would make me go crazy)
• mi avresti fatto impazzire   
  (past conditional: you would have made me go crazy)
• etc.

3) The infinitive represents the action to be done.  Thus we need to use impazzire, which means "to go mad, to go crazy".

4) The action can also take a direct object (although our example from the song does not have one).  If so, then you can just add the direct object noun or pronoun (mi, ti lo/la/Le, ci, vi, li/le).

Here are some more examples of the fare causativo.  If you wanted to say, "I make you check my tires", you can say:

A te faccio controllare le gomme.
(Literally: To you I make to check my tires.)

You could simplify this by replacing the indirect object prepositional phrase a te with the indirect object pronoun ti:

Ti faccio controllare le gomme.
(Literally: To you, I make check my tires)

and you could even use a direct object pronoun for "tires" as well.  In this case you end up with a double pronoun such as:

Te le faccio controllare.
(Literally: To you, I make to check them)

Double pronoun lesson is for another day. :-)

P.S.  As a bonus, check out Salvatore Adamo's La Nuit, which is the French-language version of the song La Notte.  Fantastico!