Italian body language

(This is part of our series of posts from our six-week Road Scholar Independent Living and Learning in Florence trip to Italy in Spring 2025. We have an index to all the posts from that trip here.)

Today (April 30) was our third day of language classes. This is the view that greets us in the morning just outside the door to our apartment building on our walk to the school. A great way to start the day!

After class, Cheryl and I got pizza and salad for lunch, went back to the “119 cent” store for notebooks and folders to hold our growing collection of notes and worksheets, and then attended a Road Scholar lecture on Italian body language.

Our guest lecturer this afternoon, Alessandro, was a former actor with degrees in art and language history, who now works as a tour guide in Pisa. He taught us about the fractured origins of what we now know as the Italian language, and how even today there are so many different dialects spoken in the country that people from one region often can’t understand what is said in another unless they both speak the national “Standard Italian”.

Then it was on to learning about the famed Italian body language.

Much of today’s Italian body language has its roots in the commedia dell’arte, an early form of professional theatre, that originated in Italy and became popular throughout Europe between the 16th and 18th centuries. It featured a cast of stock characters representing different social classes and regions, and was performed largely through pantomime so that the audience could understand it regardless of whether they spoke the same language.

Because the commedia was designed to appeal to the masses, it featured a lot of vulgar humor, which developed into today’s Italian gestures, many of which are also vulgar, but may be either humorous or insulting, depending on the context and facial expressions. We saw a video of two Italians having a full conversation completely with gestures and body language, no words!

After the class we made a quick stop at the grocery store to buy food for dinner, passing the Uffizi Galleries as we walked along the south side of the Arno.

Stopping for a rest as we climb the long hill from the supermarket back to our apartment. We’re both going to have great legs after this trip!

Once we got home, we cooked dinner, visited briefly with our next door neighbor and fellow Road Scholar Georgia, who brought us a delicious brownie from her dinner out, talked for a while on the phone with our son Ethan, and then crashed. Tomorrow is International Workers Day, a national holiday and our first day off since we arrived, so we get to sleep in a bit!