Architecture and building history

The fifteenth entry is la cupola, a word English already owns, borrowed from Italian and shrunk on the way over. In Italian it carries the thing at any size. La cupola di San Pietro and la cupola del Brunelleschi are the two that people travel to look at; la cupola geodetica is a modern engineering shell; and il duomo, which sounds as though it ought to be the dome, is in fact the cathedral standing underneath one. In English, « a cupola » is only the small one: the lantern, turret or little vaulted cap sitting on a roof, often with windows, on a stable block or a town hall. The big one is « a dome », and no English guide has ever called St Peter’s a cupola. The two words therefore do not overlap — they sit one inside the other. What English means by « cupola », Italian usually calls la lanterna, and la lanterna is the thing that stands on top of la cupola.