The weather in more detail

La fascia climatica contains a word an English reader already owns and will therefore misread. Both languages have it from the Latin fascia, a band or a strip, and that is where the agreement stops. In English the word went narrow and technical. A « fascia » is the board above a shop front carrying the name; in a car it is the dashboard; on a building it is the flat board along the eaves; in anatomy it is the sheet of tissue wrapped round a muscle. Nobody uses it for anything else, and nobody uses it much. Italian kept the plain sense and built on it. La fascia is a strip of anything at all: the bandage on an arm, the captain’s armband, and above all any range that a scale has been cut into. La fascia oraria is a time slot, la fascia d’età an age bracket, la fascia di reddito an income bracket, and la fascia climatica a climate zone. One Italian noun thus does the work of « band », « bracket », « slot » and « zone », while the English lookalike is none of the four.