Introduction: Cinque (1999) and subsequent studies on the structural hierarchy of functional projections of the clause have considered the different observable positions of the inflected verb and of the past participle in languages like Italian as evidence that adverbs occupy specifier positions and the verb moves through head positions. Te main argument in favor of the idea that adverbs do not move is that their relative order does not change independently from the position of the verbal forms. In (1) it is shown that in standard Italian the negative adverb mica and the aspectual adverb più ‘no longer’ always appear in the order mica-più independently from the position of the inflected verb and the past participle.