Organising the work in Italian

The fifth entry is la tabella di marcia, and it repays a minute because both nouns inside it are still visible. Una tabella is a table in the sense of a printed grid, and la marcia is the march, the walking; taken literally the phrase is a table of marching, the grid that says where something moving ought to be at each hour. Italian uses it of a train and of a cyclist as readily as of a project. What makes it worth learning is not the noun on its own but the fixed expressions built on it, because those are what a reader meets. Essere in tabella di marcia is to be on time; rispettare la tabella di marcia is to keep to the plan; and siamo fuori tabella di marcia, said in meetings every day of the week, means the work has slipped. English has no marching anywhere in this. We say « on schedule », « on track », « behind schedule » and, for the rare happy case, « ahead of schedule » — one image from the railway and one from the racecourse, with nobody walking in either.