Poletto, C. (2016). ‘Which clues for which V2’, in E. Bidese, F. Cognola and M. C. Moroni (eds.), Theoretical Approaches to Linguistic Variation [Linguistik aktuell/Linguistics today 234]. Amsterdam & Philapelphia: John Benjamins, 237–258. Introduction: In previous work (Poletto 2006, 2014 and in press) on Old Italian I argued on favor of the idea that all phases are built in a parallel fashion independently from the category they start with, either the verb, Tense or the noun. The parallelism manifests itself in the left periphery of Old Italian in a particularly clear way since each phase, CP, vP and DP, seem to display the same configuration and movement properties, i.e. we can identify a Focus/Operator position preceded by a set of Topics located just at the edge of each phase.