Art history in Italian

The thirty-ninth entry is la storia espositiva, and the noun in the middle is the one a reader thinks is already settled. La storia does cover both of the jobs English splits between « history » and « story », and that much is familiar. What is not familiar is the life the word leads away from the page. Fare storie has nothing to do with telling anything: it means to make a fuss, to raise difficulties, to drag one’s feet over something that ought to be simple. Il bambino fa storie per andare a letto is a child refusing to go to bed, and non fare storie, said flatly, is the ordinary way of telling somebody to stop objecting. On its own, storie! is a one-word dismissal — nonsense, rubbish, not a word of it true — and sono tutte storie says the same at greater length. One more: hanno avuto una storia reports a love affair and not a narrative. English reaches here for « fuss », « nonsense » and « fling », and nothing in « story » holds the three together. On a museum label the word behaves; in speech it rarely does.