The past progressive is conveyed by the simple past form.

Like the present progressive, the Italian past progressive is extremely regular.

There are two very common paraphrastic constructions for the present and past progressives.

The past progressive is considered interchangeable with the imperfect.

The Past Progressive stresses the fact that the action was continuous in the past.

For action that was ongoing at the time referred to, the past progressive is generally used instead (e.g. I was cooking).

The past progressive is often used to denote an action that was interrupted by an event, or for two actions taking place in parallel:

The past progressive can also be used to refer to past action that occurred over a range of time and is viewed as an ongoing situation:

Conjugations of the Past Progressive: