Andrea De Jorio

Andrea De Jorio (1769-1851) was an Italian scholar and archaeologist born on the island of Ischia in the Gulf of Naples, Italy.

De Jorio became a canon at the Cathedral of Naples and curator of the Royal Bourbon Museum, now the National Archaeological Museum. He wrote extensively about the then-recent excavations of classical antiquity near Naples, such as Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Cumae. He is best remembered today, however, for his book, "La mimica degli antichi investigate nel gestire napoletano" (“The Mimicry of Ancient Peoples Investigated through Neapolitan Gestures”). It was published in 1832 and was the first scholarly investigation of Neapolitan hand gestures; it remains the source literature for more recent treatments of the topic, both scholarly and popular. The book stressed the continuity from Classical times to the present by showing the similarity between hand gestures depicted on ancient Greek vases found near Naples and the gestures of modern Neapolitans. The volume has been reprinted three times photostatically in Italian in recent years—1964, 1979, and 2002—and recently (2000) in a scholarly and annotated English translation by Adam Kendon as "Gesture in Naples and Gesture in Classical Antiquity" (Indiana University Press). [ There are at least two reviews of the English translation, both of which praise the original as well as the erudite translation, which includes an 80-page essay/introduction. The first review is "The Neapolitan Finger" by Joan Acocella in the "The New York Review of Books" in the year 2000 and in "Sign Language Studies", a journal published by Gallaudet University in 2002. The other review is by Giovanna Ceserani of Princeton University; it appeared in the "Bryn Mawr Classical Review" in 2003.]

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