Moving house and furniture in Italian

Il materasso is the one word here that a reader of English already owns without knowing it. Behind both materasso and « mattress » stands the Arabic maṭraḥ, built on a verb meaning to throw down: the place where something is thrown, and from there the padded thing thrown on the floor to sit or sleep on. Sleeping on a cushion laid on the ground rather than on a raised frame was a habit medieval Europe met in the Arab world, and the word travelled with the habit — into medieval Latin as matracium, into Italian as il materasso, into old French as materas, and out of French into English. Nothing in the shape of « mattress » points back to any of that, which is why the link is invisible from one side and plain once the two words stand together. The gain is small and worth having: the longest noun on the page needs no learning at all, only the gender, and the double s is the one thing that has to be watched in writing.