Even though they are not the only ones to speak with the hands, it is clear that the Italians are not stingy in gestures to accompany their word. According to a stereotype deeply rooted in European minds, the Mediterranean people would be more passionate, more expressive in their emotions, hence this tendency to join the gesture to the word (and to speak louder, but it is a question of Other debate). Sometimes considered as familiar or excessive for the uninitiated, the ample gestures are largely assimilated and understood by the locals.

According to a first hypothesis, the Italians would have developed this propensity to "gesture" (from the Latin gesticulus, meaning small gesture, pantomime for the anecdote) to communicate more easily at a time when the population spoke several dialects and not an official and unique Italian.

According to another theory, if the Italians speak with the hands, it is above all because of their History. Isabella Poggi, a professor at Rome 3 University, has just studied this "language of gestures". She recorded a total of 250 gestures that have the meaning of words or expressions: perfect, too bad, whatever, if you knew, rich, fearful, go away from here ... This very rich gesture would be a legacy of the various invasions suffered by Italy in the past. To communicate with each other without being understood by the occupants, the Italians had to find an alternative way to exchange. Chance or not, the city of Naples, occupied alternately by the Greeks, Byzantines, Normans, French, and Spaniards, is one of the cities of Italy where one speaks the most with the hands.

The historical hypothesis that explains why Italians speak with the hands is quite plausible, it does not explain why these gestures have lasted until nowadays, well after the departure of the Greek, Byzantine, French and other occupants.In Barcelona, ​​two researchers from the Pompeu Fabra University have examined the links between language and gestures. To do this, they studied the gestures that babies make, during the period between the end of babbling and the pronunciation of words. The findings of this study prove that in children, the coordination between language and gesture occurs even before the mastery of the first words.

According to Núria Esteve Gibert, one of the researchers, it is impossible to study language and human communication completely by taking into account only verbal language. In San Francisco this time, other researchers have studied the link between performing gestures and solving problems in the child. The results obtained show that children who often make gestures to express themselves perform better certain tasks. This mode of communication, valid for both children and adults, has given birth to a method of language learning, the "Total Physical Response ", which proposes to teach a language by associating it with the movement to facilitate understanding and assimilation.For cultural or scientific reasons, there is no way to explain with certainty why Italians speak with the hands.