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« Milestone » and il traguardo are both borrowed from the road, and they are borrowed from opposite ends of it. A milestone is exactly what the word says: a stone set at the roadside with a number cut into it, telling a traveller how far he has come and how far is left. Nothing about it is final, and its whole use is that another one follows. Il traguardo comes from the verb traguardare, to look through something narrow in order to line something up; the noun named the sighting slit before it named anything on a racetrack, and the finishing line is a line first sighted and then crossed. It is where a thing stops. Tagliare il traguardo is to cross that line, and in ordinary speech un traguardo is an achievement finally reached. So il traguardo intermedio is, read literally, a finishing line laid down in the middle, and the small strangeness is worth keeping: Italian names the checkpoint after the end of the race, English names it after the distance already walked.