The most famous Italian gesture: do you know its meaning?

Italians and gestures what is the relationship? Why do we gesture? Recently especially with the internet, gifs memes and emoji the Italian gesture of “hand to bag” or “artichoke hand” has spread, what are its origins? What does it mean, it has several meanings, which ones?

For Italians, gesturing is a personal and innate characteristic, a distinctive gesture. Wherever an Italian is, in the world, it is not necessary to wait for him to speak to recognize him. Simply observe him because sooner or later, his body will betray him. Italians, in fact, are famous for their body and gesture communication also because of their passion and history of theater.

Before social networks era we only gesticulated face-to-face when we had a chance to meet someone and talk to them; now, with the arrival of gifs and emoji, it is possible to gesture online as well, showing the other person our smiling face or disappointment, perplexity or anger.

Very fashionable is the “artichoke gesture,” introduced as a new emoji and suggested by Adriano Farano to the Unicode Consortium for 2020. In this way, digital writing becomes more authentic, more Neapolitan.

The artichoke gesture: a symbol of identity

The artichoke gesture has multiple meanings:

• -what do you want?
• -why?
• -what did you say? (when you don’t understand something or don’t listen someone and ask to repeat)
  -“wait a moment” or “be patient” (arabic variant – since they also use it but in a different way)

Foreigners to imitate Italians and their speech often resort to this hand motion. Even in many famous movies, in the past as well as to this day, is used the same gesture as a stereotype of Italian culture.

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