Sport management

The twenty-fourth entry is l’eredità dell’evento, and the two languages reach that idea from opposite corners of Roman law. English says « legacy », which came through Anglo-Norman from legatum, the thing left by a will: a legatum was one named gift, carved out of an estate and handed to somebody the testator had chosen. Italian keeps l’eredità, from hereditas, which is the estate itself, the whole of what passes to the heir, l’erede. So where English names the gift, Italian names the inheritance, and that difference is still working. L’eredità covers the money left by a grandmother, the heritage a country carries and the legacy of a tournament all at once, and Italian has no separate word for the third. Il lascito does exist and is the exact match for a legatum, one thing left to one person, but nobody would use it of a stadium or of a habit of walking to work. Read l’eredità dell’evento, then, as what the city has been left holding, and not as a present picked out for it.