Based on the description given in the Grammatica dell’italiano antico, the paper reviews the main movement and extraction phenomena of Medieval Italian. The grammar of Old Italian made a more extensive use of Scrambling and of phrase movements targetting the left periphery of the sentence. The left periphery positions were targeted in noun phrases and prepositional phrases too, a fact which permitted some types of extraction no longer possible in Modern Italian. On the other hand, the general constraints on extraction domains (islands) had the same validity as in the modern language. The cases of apparent violation of these constraints can be shown not to involve extraction, and can be accounted for using a layered structure for left periphery or, in other cases, assuming that the empty category is not the trace of movement, but the result of ellipsis.
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