Building and property

Twenty-fourth on the list is il geometra, and it is the entry most likely to be read as a joke about mathematics. « A geometer » in English is somebody who works on geometry, or, to a naturalist, a family of moths; it has never been a building trade. Il geometra is a building trade, and a very ordinary one. He is the man who turns up with the instrument and stakes out the plot — the sentence on this page says exactly that — who measures what has been built, draws the small projects that do not need an architect, prepares the papers for the land registry and signs the survey attached to a sale. In the Italian system it is a qualification in its own right, taken at a technical school and entered in a professional register, so geometra on a letterhead is a job title and not a description of what somebody studied. The nearest English word is « surveyor ». Going the other way, a mathematician is un geometra only in a bookish Italian that nobody uses on site; the everyday word is un matematico.