Body Language Italian Style

Last week I was at a friend’s party, in the crowd of guests I noticed a guy and I thought, “he must be Italian!”. It wasn’t because of his Mediterranean features or his accent, which I couldn’t pick up from a distance, but because of his body language. He was talking in English while moving both of his hands to accompany his speech.

If you look at Italians involved in a conversation from a distance they usually seem very passionate about what they are saying. You might think, “wow, something extremely important is going on over there!” Well it’s almost never the case, Italians are just very expressive! A tax refund, or how they want their hair cutting the next time they go to the hairdresser could be the subject of this improvised choreography you are witnessing.

Facial expressions, hand movements and sometimes even the way they stand can tell a lot about their need to express themselves. This way their behaviour might seem theatrical and exaggerated to a foreigner. On the contrary, Italians tend to find strange the way English speakers most of the time speak, just moving their mouth, and they find that even the intonations of the English language are not emotional at all. It must be because of the cold or the rain, someone thinks, people don’t usually want to gesticulate in the rain. Do they? Obviously not all Italians gesticulate in the same way.

The habit of gesticulating is very much related to regional provenience and education. The use of gestures is more common in the south of Italy and its origins might be related to the need to communicate with different cultures on the maritime trade network which involved mostly the southern part of Italy.

The amazing thing about Italians though is that they gesticulate even on the telephone! No matter where they are, they’ll gesticulate even if they are driving! And what if the person driving is talking about how big the fish was that he caught yesterday, moving his hands to describe the length of the fish! This takes us back to the subject we dealt with in our previous article about Italian drivers and how careful you need to be if you drive in Italy!

People might find Italian gestures quite dramatic. But what would you expect from the country which invented opera? All right people don’t go out in the streets made up or dressed in clothes of a different epoch, and they don’t usually sing, but nevertheless they have a passionate spirit which needs to be expressed in everyday life!

A nice video on Italian gestures can be found at this link

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0n4Vw6twKo

for a most complete and detailed list of gestures

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHZwYObN264

Giulia Lombardo