During an interview with BBC, Poggi said that “Hand gestures may be more important in Italian culture than in any other, we inherited the language of gestures from the Greeks. When the Greeks moved to southern Italy and colonized Naples, the Italians used gestures as a way to communicate without being overheard. The gestures continued to have a tradition as a way of communicating”.
Andrea de Jorio (1769-1851), Canon of the Cathedral of Naples, antiquarian and expert on greek antiquities, noticed that the gestures represented on ancient greek vases have a similarity with the ones acted by his neapolitans citizens. So he elevates by primitivism and vulgarity the gestures (showed also in classic antiquity) and analyzed in La mimica degli antichi investigata nel gestire napoletano, 1832 (“The mime of the Ancients investigated through Neapolitan gesture”), the first gestures collections ever made.