Home and household in Italian

Un piatto tipico della zona is not about a plate at all, and that is the whole difficulty. Italian gives il piatto three jobs that English hands to three unrelated words. It is the object you eat from: lavo i piatti dopo cena. It is the food itself, the thing a cook has made, which is the sense carried by the sentence on this page. And it is the position that food occupies in a meal, so that il primo piatto and il secondo piatto are what a menu in English would call the first and the second course. English keeps « plate » for the object and will not let it stand for food in the abstract. « Dish » does carry both, the vessel and what was cooked in it, and that is the single point where the two meanings touch — it is why « to do the dishes » means washing up. « Course » belongs to the meal alone and never to crockery. The consequence runs one way: three words collapse into one going in, and coming out nothing inside piatto says which of the three is meant. Only the sentence around it does.