Festivals and customs in Italian

Sixteenth on this list is il costume tipico, glossed here as the traditional dress, and the middle word is one an English reader will walk straight past. « Costume » in English is fancy dress and stage clothes and very little else. Il costume is those things too, but only third in line. First comes the beach. Il costume on its own, in a shop or in a suitcase, is the swimming costume, and ho dimenticato il costume is a complaint about a holiday, not about a play; il costume da bagno is the full form and hardly anybody says it. Second comes a sense no English reader expects at all. In the plural, i costumi are the manners and morals of a people — i costumi del paese, and il buon costume, which is still the wording of Italian law. Only after those two does the carnival sense arrive, and even there la maschera, further up this same list, often does the work instead. So il costume tipico is what a village wears on its feast day, while the word by itself in a July shop window is swimwear.