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The fine art of Italian hand gestures: A vintage visual dictionary (2012)

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Re: The fine art of Italian hand gestures: A vintage visual dictionary (2012)

#21
post #4
post #3

I had some hard time deciphering the gesture from still images, but I have to say it's pretty accurate and I am surprised by how I am used to using them when I speak Italian, and how I unconsciously avoid them when speaking English. I never thought about it. Now that I live abroad, I wonder if I'm slowly losing that "body language", and making myself harder to understand to other Italian speakers, entering some uncan…

The unconscious component is crazy, my otalian SO was trying to teach me to do some of the gestures correctly but she was not able to execute the gestures consciously, only in the flow of speech

Subconscious. Unconscious gestures would not be very interesting as they're mostly just snoring.

(I am aware we already lost this battle with the now-canonized-as-professional-jargon misnomer term "unconscious bias".)

Re: The fine art of Italian hand gestures: A vintage visual dictionary (2012)

#23

Every time I rewatch the Sopranos, the "non me ne importa" gesture gets into my vocabulary for a while. (I think of it more as the "vaffanculo" gesture though, as it almost always accompanies this phrase in the show). It has this wonderful quality of vulgar, spiteful dismissal that we don't have a good expression for in English - although the somewhat common "jerk off" gesture is similar in intent, that one is pretty…

> Every time I rewatch the Sopranos Those are Americans, not Italians.

thanks we didn't know

Re: The fine art of Italian hand gestures: A vintage visual dictionary (2012)

#24
post #5

I see the book's publication is from 1958 and much of the imagery suggests a bygone era. Are all or most of these still in use today? It's amusing to note that the first picture has in the middle of the last row, the now ubiquitous "Heavy Metal horns." I remember reading an old interview with Ronnie James Dio, who was Italian, where he said he picked up the gesture from his Grandmother. It's widely accepted that he i…

>Are all or most of these still in use today?

Yes, largely (some are more regional).

If you check the link in my post here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32353697

Those are recent (2010) and since they are in video you can better recognize them as compared to static drawings or photos.

Re: The fine art of Italian hand gestures: A vintage visual dictionary (2012)

#25
post #12
post #2

In 2010 a newer dictionary of gestures was made, the Author (Fabio Caon) also made a set of videos of the gestures (there was a DVD attached to this new dictionary), and published them as videos on youtube, links on his page here (Italian): https://www.itals.it/gesti-degli-italiani

I have that book. Caon was my SO's thesis advisor. The interesting part about that book is that it also points out whether the gesture has a different meaning in other cultures. For example it says the gesture for "OK" that you do by making a circle with your thumb and index finger has a vulgar meaning in Russia (iirc).

in some latin america countries as well

Re: The fine art of Italian hand gestures: A vintage visual dictionary (2012)

#28
post #27

A demonstration by Giancarlo Giannini and Mariangela Melato in Lina Wertmüller's The Seduction of Mimi : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mx407UflJQ

Wonderful, thanks for that. Wertmüller's “Swept Away” (also starring Giannini and Melato) is one of my favorite films. Wonder how much hand dialog I’ve been missing!

Re: The fine art of Italian hand gestures: A vintage visual dictionary (2012)

#29
This made the rounds last summer during the Euros with the Italian sports journalist Tancredi Palmeri tweeting "Stop with this stereotype about Italians doing hand gestures. It's not t":

https://twitter.com/bettinghub/status/1415779102460715009

(the original video has been deleted)

Re: The fine art of Italian hand gestures: A vintage visual dictionary (2012)

#30
A friend of mine from somewhere around Como has a gesture where she taps her upper arm with her index finger while making a theatrical pained expression. I have no idea what it represents or means. She usually does it while reacting to something she doesn't like, perhaps particularly being asked to go along with someone else's suggestion which she thinks will be arduous.

It vaguely suggests someone shooting up heroin, but i'm not sure why that would be relevant.

I have not asked her about it. I think i prefer the mystery.

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