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A Short Lexicon of Italian Gestures
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ROME JOURNAL
When Italians Chat, Hands and Fingers Do the Talking
By RACHEL DONADIO
Published: June 30, 2013
ROME — In the great open-air theater that is Rome, the characters
talk with their hands as much as their mouths. While talking
animatedly on their cellphones or smoking cigarettes or even while
downshifting their tiny cars through rush-hour traffic, they
gesticulate with enviably elegant coordination.
From the classic fingers pinched
against the thumb that can mean
“Whaddya want from me?” or “I
wasn’t born yesterday” to a hand
circled slowly, indicating “Whatever”
or “That’ll be the day,” there is an
eloquence to the Italian hand gesture.
In a culture that prizes oratory,
nothing deflates airy rhetoric more
swiftly.
Some gestures are simple: the side of the hand against the
belly means hungry; the index finger twisted into the cheek
means something tastes good; and tapping one’s wrist is a
universal sign for “hurry up.” But others are far more
complex. They add an inflection — of fatalism, resignation,
world-weariness — that is as much a part of the Italian
experience as breathing.
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Gianni Cipriano for The New York Times
The Italian Gesture: Can Italians talk without using their hands? Gestures that insult, beg and swear offer a window
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The politician Nicola Cosentino at anews conference in January.
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Gianni Cipriano for The New York Times
Nichi Vendola, a politician, punctuated
an answer with a hand gesture.
Two open hands can ask a real question, “What’s
happening?” But hands placed in prayer become a sort of
supplication, a rhetorical question: “What do you expect
me to do about it?” Ask when a Roman bus might arrive,
and the universal answer is shrugged shoulders, an “ehh”
that sounds like an engine turning over and two raised
hands that say, “Only when Providence allows.”
To Italians, gesturing comes naturally. “You mean Americans don’t gesture? They talk like this?” asked
Pasquale Guarrancino, a Roman taxi driver, freezing up
and placing his arms flat against his sides. He had been
sitting in his cab talking with a friend outside, each moving
his hands in elaborate choreography. Asked to describe his
favorite gesture, he said it was not fit for print.
In Italy, children and adolescents gesture. The elderly
gesture. Some Italians joke that gesturing may even begin
before birth. “In the ultrasound, I think the baby is saying,
‘Doctor, what do you want from me?’ ” said Laura Offeddu,
a Roman and an elaborate gesticulator, as she pinched herfingers together and moved her hand up and down.
On a recent afternoon, two middle-aged men in elegant dark suits were deep in
conversation outside the Giolitti ice cream parlor in downtown Rome, gesturing even as
they held gelato in cones. One, who gave his name only as Alessandro, noted that younger
people used a gesture that his generation did not: quotation marks to signify irony.
Sometimes gesturing can get out of hand. Last year, Italy’s highest court ruled that a man
who inadvertently struck an 80-year-old woman while gesticulating in a piazza in the
southern region Puglia was liable for civil damages. “The public street isn’t a living room,”
the judges ruled, saying, “The habit of accompanying a conversation with gestures, while
certainly licit, becomes illicit” in some contexts.
In 2008, Umberto Bossi, the colorful founder of the conservative Northern League, raised
his middle finger during the singing of Italy’s national anthem. But prosecutors in Venice
determined that the gesture, while obscene and the cause of widespread outrage, was not a
crime.
Gestures have long been a part of Italy’s political spectacle. Former Prime Minister Silvio
Berlusconi is a noted gesticulator. When he greeted President Obama and his wife,
Michelle, at a meeting of the Group of 20 leaders in September 2009, he extended both
hands, palms facing toward himself, and then pinched his fingers as he looked Mrs.
Obama up and down — a gesture that might be interpreted as “va-va-voom.”
In contrast, Giulio Andreotti — Christian Democrat, seven-time prime minister and by farthe most powerful politician of the Italian postwar era — was famous for keeping both
hands clasped in front of him. The subtle, patient gesture functioned as a kind of
deterrent, indicating the tremendous power he could deploy if he chose to.
Isabella Poggi, a professor of psychology at Roma Tre University and an expert on
gestures, has identified around 250 gestures that Italians use in everyday conversation.
“There are gestures expressing a threat or a wish or desperation or shame or pride,” she
said. The only thing differentiating them from sign language is that they are used
individually and lack a full syntax, Ms. Poggi added.
Far more than quaint folklore, gestures have a rich history. One theory holds that Italians
developed them as an alternative form of communication during the centuries when they
lived under foreign occupation — by Austria, France and Spain in the 14th through 19th
centuries — as a way of communicating without their overlords understanding.
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A version of this article appeared in print on July 1, 2013, on page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: When
Italians Chat, Hands and Fingers Do the Talking.
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Another theory, advanced by Adam Kendon, the editor in chief of the journal Gesture, is
that in overpopulated cities like Naples, gesturing became a way of competing, of marking
one’s territory in a crowded arena. “To get attention, people gestured and used their whole
bodies,” Ms. Poggi said, explaining the theory.
Andrea De Jorio, a 19th-century priest and archaeologist, discovered comparisons
between the gestures used by the figures painted on ancient Greek vases found in the
Naples area and the gestures used by his Neapolitan contemporaries.
Over the centuries, languages have evolved, but gestures remain. “Gestures change less
than words,” Ms. Poggi said.
Philosophers have long been preoccupied by gesture. In “The New Science,” the 18th-
century Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico, who once taught rhetoric at the University
of Naples, argued that gesture might have been the earliest form of language.
By some accounts, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein overhauled — or at least refined
— his theory that language was used to establish truth, to inform, after the Italian
economist Piero Sraffa responded to his theory with a single gesture: fingers brushing the
chin, indicating “I don’t give a damn,” the classic antiauthority brushoff.
Such a gesture does not convey information; it negates it. “It’s a rebellion against power,”Ms. Poggi said, “a way of reacquiring one’s own dignity.”
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