Walking and mountain days

Two thirds of the way down sits la zecca, the tick you check your legs for after a wood. It has a twin with which it shares nothing but a spelling: la Zecca is also the mint, the works where coins are struck, and la Zecca dello Stato strikes the coins of the country. English is in no position to laugh, because its own « mint » is two words as well, the coin works and the herb. What makes the pair worth keeping is the phrase the coin one produced. Nuovo di zecca is fresh from the mint, and it is what Italian says of a car, a passport or a pair of boots that has never been used: « brand new ». English took the same picture and put it to a slightly different use. « In mint condition » says that a thing looks untouched, not that it is new, and it is normally said of old things — a stamp, a first edition, a bicycle from the seventies. The two idioms meet at the mint and part at once: one is about age, the other about wear.