Italian Hand Gestures 2025: What They Actually Mean and When Italians Use Them

How Andrea de Jorio's 1832 study of ancient Greek vase painting created the world's first gesture dictionary — and what Homer has to do with Italian hand gestures

The first systematic academic study of Italian hand gestures is also one of the most remarkable books in the history of anthropology: Andrea de Jorio's "La mimica degli antichi investigata nel gestire napoletano" (1832 — "The gesture of the ancients investigated through Neapolitan gesture"), which argued that the gestures depicted in the poses of figures on ancient Greek vases and in ancient statuary found at Pompeii and Herculaneum are identical to the gestures still used by contemporary Neapolitans, and that the continuous cultural transmission of Naples (from the Greek colony of Neapolis through the Roman period, the Byzantine period, and the medieval/early modern period) preserved a gestural vocabulary that had been lost elsewhere in the Mediterranean. De Jorio's specific method: he documented approximately 100 Neapolitan gestures and cross-referenced each with ancient Greek and Roman visual sources — the result was simultaneously a Neapolitan ethnography and an ancient gesture dictionary. The subsequent scholarship: de Jorio's book was translated into English by Adam Kendon (2000, University of Chicago Press) and has become the foundation of the academic study of gesture, which now recognizes that gesture accompanies human speech universally but varies in form and frequency across cultures and languages.