The Man Who Cataloged How Italians Talk With Their Hands

When I was in 9th grade, my friends and I spent a few weeks biting our thumbs at each other. I suspect a lot of kids do, right after they read Romeo and Juliet.

The thumb-biting is basically the first thing that happens in the play. In “fair Verona,” young toughs from the feuding Montague and Capulet families encounter each other. The Capulet servants Gregory and Sampson try to calibrate their display of disrespect toward their enemies:

Sampson. Let us take the law of our sides; let them begin.

Gregory. I will frown as I pass by, and let them take it as they list.

Sampson. Nay, as they dare. I will bite my thumb at them; which is a disgrace to them, if they bear it.

[Enter ABRAHAM and BALTHASAR]

Abraham. Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?

Sampson. I do bite my thumb, sir.

Abraham. Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?

Sampson. [Aside to GREGORY] Is the law of our side, if I say ay?

Gregory. No.

Sampson. No, sir, I do not bite my thumb at you, sir, but I bite my thumb, sir.

Baz Luhrmann envisioned the scene this way:

As teenagers who had never encountered thumb-biting, we thought the whole thing was pretty funny. And we wouldn’t get in trouble in school for biting our thumbs at each other the way we might for giving people the finger. So we enthusiastically adopted this sign of disrespect for a time.

As historian Ruth Goodman notes, Shakespeare’s English audiences may also have been unfamiliar with the gesture. After all, the playwright makes Sampson explain, a little clunkily, that it constitutes a “disgrace” to the Montagues. Goodman speculates that Shakespeare may have chosen the gesture for the same reason that my high school friends liked it: it was a rude (but not too rude) Italian gesture that he could use without upsetting his English audience.

When it came to another, more vulgar, Italian gesture, Shakespeare was a little more cautious. In Henry V, a character named Pistol mentions — but does not perform — another rude gesture: the “fig of Spain,” in which you make a fist and stick your thumb out between your index and middle fingers. In Italian and Spanish, the words for “fig” and “vulva” are very close to one another, so the fig gesture became a way of insulting an adversary’s manhood. Shakespeare, Goodman argues, may have avoided having his character actually make the fig gesture because it was familiar (and offensive) in England, having entered the country through trade with the Mediterranean.

These little references in Shakespeare reveal that, for hundreds of years, several things have been true. Nonverbal gestures are an important form of communication. Different cultures use different gestures to convey certain meanings. And some cultures make more use of gestures than others. You’ll notice that, in Shakespeare, the fig and thumb-biting both come from the Mediterranean. Today, we still say that “Italians talk with their hands.”

So how did the language of gesture develop, and why is it so important in southern Europe?

One of the first people to tackle this question was a priest who desperately wanted to let the world see how great his hometown was, and did so by cataloging all of the ways that Italians talk with their hands.