Planning the city and its traffic

La sosta is glossed on this page as « parking », and the gloss names the right thing while getting the size of the word wrong. The road code in Italy splits a stationary vehicle into three, and the three are not stylistic variants. L’arresto is being stopped by the traffic itself, a queue or a red light, and it is nobody’s decision. La fermata is a short halt the driver chooses and stays for: setting somebody down, waiting at a level crossing. La sosta is what a halt becomes once it stops being short — the vehicle stays and the driver may walk away. British signs draw the very same line, and draw it with verbs, which is why the two sets look unrelated to a reader of English. « No stopping » on a clearway forbids la fermata and everything longer with it; « no waiting » beside a yellow line forbids la sosta only, so a driver may still pull in to let a passenger out. The pair worth learning is therefore not sosta against « parking » but sosta against fermata, because divieto di sosta and divieto di fermata are two different offences.