School and learning in Italian

Near the end of the list sits la ricreazione, and it repays a second look, because English owns the word and spends it on something else. In an Italian school la ricreazione is the break between lessons: the fifteen minutes in the middle of the morning when the room empties, the sandwich comes out and the corridor gets loud. It is the word on the timetable and the word a child uses — durante la ricreazione, è suonata la ricreazione. « Recreation » is not a break at all. It is leisure taken as a category, sport and walking and anything done for pleasure outside work, which is why a town has a recreation ground and a form asks about recreational activities, and why the adjective has drifted far enough to attach itself most often to drugs. English has no grand single word for the school interval and simply says « break », or « playtime » for the youngest children. The two are one Latin recreatio, a restoring, and both are honest heirs: one kept the restoring short and left it in a school, the other let it last all Sunday.