Today I bumped into a friend of mine, an Italian native speaker, on the street I hadn't seen for quite a while. I'm pretty sure she said:
Sarà un'eternità e mezza che non ti vedo!
Looking back on it, the tense used here piques my interest: despite the fact that we have already seen each other just now, what is the rationale for using the present tense "vedo" rather than the imperfect "vedevo"? It almost sounds like we have yet to meet in person (the state of not seeing each other is still ongoing) and our next encounter will be some time in the near future.
{vs}: Sarà un'eternità e mezza che non ti vedevo!
I'm all the more curious, since in French and German we express the same idea in complete different tenses, perfect tenses, conveying the sense of a completed action:
Ça faisait longtemps qu'on ne s'était pas vus ! --- {imperfect + past perfect}
Dich habe ich ja schon ewig nicht gesehen! --- {present perfect}