Museum and conservation

The twenty-third entry is il basamento, and it is the word in this list an English reader is most likely to translate wrongly at speed. « Basement » and il basamento are built on the same « base », but English sent its word downstairs and Italian did not. Il basamento is what a thing stands on and what shows: the plinth under a sculpture, the moulded lower course of a façade, the block under a machine. It goes up, not down. The storey below ground has quite different names — il seminterrato when it is half sunk, lo scantinato when it is fully under, la cantina for the cellar where things are kept — and none of them is built on that root at all. The difference is not academic, because a condition report is where it surfaces. Il basamento è scheggiato says a corner of the plinth is chipped and that the work itself is sound; read as « the basement is chipped » it describes a building instead. The verb usually settles it: a basamento raises, supports and carries, and nobody ever goes down into one.