The aim of this paper is to provide a detailed description of the textual continuative function of the adverb sempre, based on data from four corpora of written Italian. The results of corpus searches show that since the 1920s the notion of continuity originally conveyed by sempre at the temporal level has been extended to the textual level. In the last part of the paper, we reflect on more general issues, such as the dynamics that fostered the development of the textual use of the adverb, the nature of the expressed continuity and the place of sempre within the class of focus adverbs.