![]() This is perhaps the most classical and well-known among Italian gestures. Here are 17 of the most common Italian hand gestures Italians use every day including what they mean, when to use them, and most importantly, how to do them! Gestures give us an insight into Italian culture and knowing how to “handle” them will surely make your life in Italy much easier, whether you just moved there to work or study or travel and visit friends or family. It’s simply part of the culture and it is acquired unconsciously by children imitating their parents and peers’ behaviours, meaning they develop gesticulating as an involuntary and natural habit. That is why gestures still play such an important role to Italians! It helps them better understand each other, it adds emphasis to their speech, it gives them that theatrical and dramatic tone when they speak that everybody around the world loves so much. Nowadays, despite the majority of the Italian population speaking standardised Italian, hand gestures have stuck out as a method of expression to accompany verbal communication in Italy. It took some time, and mostly thanks to school and television (yes, television!), to make Italian the primary language used in daily communication. In the beginning, however, most people still used the dialect of their own region to communicate, which meant Italian was the official language on paper but not in real life. Until 1861, that is, when Italy was officially “reunited” to become the state we know nowadays. Over time, several ethnic groups and populations imposed their languages, cultures and mannerisms in the current territory that is Italy: the Carolingians, the Visigoths, the Normans, the Saracens, the Germanic tribes (Vandals, Ostrogoths and Lombards), the Spaniards, the French and the Austrians. ![]() What you probably don’t know is that the need to find a common non-verbal code to communicate traces back to the fall of the Western Roman Empire, when the arrival of new immigrants and colonizers from other regions of the world forced people to find new ways of communicating to overcome language barriers. Hand gestures constitute a vital part of Italian communication – in fact, one could say that most conversations are incomplete without them! Did you know that there are at least 250 Italian hand gestures that locals use on a daily basis? They are the essence of conversation as much as punctuation is to writing. When it comes to body language, nobody does it better than Italians! Hand gestures, facial expressions, and posture play an essential role in Italy.
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