Making things happen with 'fare'
When you want to express that someone is making, letting, or having someone else do something, Italian relies on a very specific pattern. While English uses verbs like make, let, or have followed by another verb, Italian uses fare immediately followed by an infinitive.
This elegant structure can trip up English speakers because the two Italian verbs stay tightly glued together, and the way objects are handled shifts slightly. Once you master it, you will unlock a highly common and natural way to express causation in Italian.
The formula is simple. You conjugate fare to match the person causing the action, and you follow it directly with the infinitive of the action being caused. There is no preposition between the two verbs.
If you want to say that someone makes you laugh, you use fare and the verb ridere.
Notice how the pronoun goes before the conjugated verb, just like a normal object pronoun. This is very common in everyday requests, such as asking someone to let you know something.
When the infinitive takes its own direct object, the person being made to do the action is treated as an indirect object. The two verbs always remain side by side.
Because this pattern is so flexible, Italian often uses it where English would just use a completely different, single verb. For instance, instead of a unique verb for to show, Italians say far vedere (literally, to make see).
Similarly, verbs like bollire (to boil) and crescere (to grow) often refer to the state of the object itself. If you are the one applying the heat or doing the gardening, you need the fare forms far bollire and far crescere.
You can also use this construction with motion verbs. For example, using fare with entrare (to enter) translates to letting someone in, while pairing it with cadere (to fall) means to drop.
You will also encounter this construction with reflexive pronouns. When fare is made reflexive, it usually means letting yourself be the target of an action. A great example is farsi coinvolgere, which means to let oneself get involved or to get drawn into something.
Whenever you want to say that someone makes, has, or lets an action happen, use fare directly followed by an infinitive. Keep the two verbs glued together without any prepositions, and place any object pronouns before fare or attached to the end of it in imperative forms.