Museology

The seventeenth entry is l’accesso per la ricerca, and the last noun covers ground that English shares out between two words. La ricerca is research, the sense this page wants: un progetto di ricerca, fare ricerca, un centro di ricerca. But it is equally the ordinary act of looking for something. La ricerca delle chiavi is a hunt for the keys and has nothing scholarly about it, essere alla ricerca di un lavoro is job-hunting, and the police conduct le ricerche for a missing person, in the plural, where English would say « the search ». The verb carries both jobs too: cercare is to look for, and ricercare can be either. Two side effects are worth having in advance. Ricercato as a past participle means wanted by the police — il latitante più ricercato — and as an adjective it means refined or studied, said of a prose style or of a dish. And una ricercatezza is an elegance, never a finding. Read ricerca by the sentence around it and this list stays in the reading room.