Addiction medicine

The fifteenth entry is il bere controllato, and the middle word is not a noun at all. English makes a noun out of a verb with « -ing » — « drinking », « smoking », « eating » — and the habit is so ordinary that it is easy to expect the same of Italian. Italian does it the other way round: it takes the infinitive exactly as it stands and puts an article in front of it. Il bere, il fumare, il mangiare, il dormire; always masculine, always singular, and anything that agrees with it agrees in the masculine singular, which is why this entry reads controllato and never controllata. Two things follow. The gerund cannot stand in for the infinitive: bevendo says what somebody is doing while something else happens, and it can never be the subject of a sentence, so il bevendo controllato is not clumsy but impossible. And the article is what does the work, so dropping it changes the sentence: si lavora sul bere controllato names a goal that has a name, while si lavora per bere meno names nothing but an effort.