Property law

The thirty-first entry is l’ordinanza di rilascio, and the noun inside it is one a reader will already have met at a passport counter. Rilasciare is literally to let go again, and Italian lets it run across four jobs that English keeps in four separate verbs. A prisoner is released: il detenuto è stato rilasciato. A document is issued: rilasciare un certificato, il passaporto è stato rilasciato dalla questura. A statement or an interview is given: rilasciare una dichiarazione, rilasciare un’intervista. And premises are handed back to whoever is entitled to them, which is the sense wanted here: il rilascio dell’immobile is the moment the tenant walks out and the keys go over. So l’ordinanza di rilascio releases nobody. It is the court order fixing the day by which the flat must be given up, and rendering the noun as « release » turns an eviction into a liberation. The habit that carries a reader through all four is to take rilascio as the letting go of something, and then to ask what the something is.