Spatial planning in Italian

The ninth entry is l’ambito prioritario, and the noun in front of it is worth a minute, because English owns that word twice over: once knowingly and once without noticing. Behind it stands the Latin ambire, to go round, built from ambi-, on both sides, and ire, to go. The noun ambitus was the going round itself — the circuit of a wall, the space a thing takes up, the ground it covers. That is the sense Italian kept whole. L’ambito is the field a rule reaches, the sphere a body is competent in, the extent of a plan: nell’ambito del progetto, l’ambito di applicazione. English has the same word in « ambit », a narrow and rather legal survival, and the ambit of a statute is exactly l’ambito di applicazione. The second borrowing travelled much further. In Rome a candidate walked round the forum soliciting votes, and that circuit was ambitio; the walking fell away and only the wanting remained, which is why « ambition » now names a hunger and no longer a route.