The aim of this article is that of clarifying those issues of the analysis of the conditional structures in Italian which are more difficult to pin down. Once their «double nature» (temporal and modal) is established, attention is switched to the most conflicting aspects shown by the conditional structures («mixed» hypothetical periods, reported speech conditional, their liability to be substituted by a past tense, etc.) and the basis for a future stylistic analysis, of a more systematic kind, is put forward.