As a part of a research project on Swiss institutional Italian, we have recently dealt with the written texts produced by the authorities of Canton Ticino during the first two years of the pandemic. Within this research framework, this article focuses on institutional speech, and more specifically on the press conferences held by the Ticino authorities at the beginning of the pandemic, from 2020 to 2022. In this research, the main focus is on the clarity of these texts. More precisely, our purpose is to identify the linguistic features – prosodic, lexical, morphosyntactic – and textual features through which clarity is achieved. The perspective adopted constantly keeps in the background the comparison with the written text, with the more general aim of identifying, beyond Covid-related communication, which are the properties of clear spoken language versus those of clear written language.