Hotel and accommodation in Italian

Seventh on this list is colazione inclusa, and the first of those two words has a stranger history than anything else on the page. La colazione comes from Latin collatio, the noun made from conferre, to bring together: a contribution, a laying of things side by side. Nothing in it means food. The meal came in through the monasteries, where the collatio was the evening reading the community gathered for, and the light refreshment taken afterwards quietly took the name of the reading. Italian kept the meal, dropped the reading, and then moved the hour: la prima colazione is breakfast, and la colazione on its own now means the same thing. English drew on the same Latin and kept both halves apart instead. To « collate » pages is still to bring them together, and a « collation » in a library is still the comparing of two copies — yet « a cold collation », a light meal set out for guests, survives in exactly the monastic sense. A reader who knows the English word therefore owns the Italian one already. What has to be learned is the clock.