3 Stereotypes About Italians That Are True...

Stereotypes, by the very nature of the term, are nothing but gross approximations, caricatures… jokes.

So here are three Italian jokes about Italian people, translated for the occasion.

Can you identify what underlying belief the joke is based on?

Let’s play “Guess the stereotype” together!

A French, a German, and an Italian soldier are captured by the enemy and held in the same prison. The enemy wants to know what their army is planning to do next, so they decide to torture them one by one.

The Frenchman is taken in first, but lasts merely a few hours: as soon as they start talking bad French to him, he yields.

Then it’s the turn of the German soldier. He lasts a whole day, enduring physical and emotional violence, but is eventually broken by bad beer and politically incorrect jokes.

Lastly, the Italian is brought to the interrogation room.

They tie him to a chair and beat him up for a whole day, and he says nothing. They realize physical violence won’t do.

They start trash-talking his mamma, but he says nothing. They realize emotional violence will not work either.

They put pineapple on a pizza and force him to eat the whole of it! And yet, he still says nothing. The interrogators realize they’ve been defeated and release him back into the prison with the other soldiers.

As soon as the guards leave, the French and German soldiers rush to the Italian.

"We have to apologize to you, we thought you’d last less than us, but you managed to say nothing at all. We are so impressed. You must love your country more than anything else!"

"Oh no! I wanted to tell them everything immediately— cries the Italian—but they tied my hands!"

1. We talk with our hands.

Most of the meaning in any human conversation is conveyed non-verbally. But we take it to a new level with a rich and nuanced yet standardized code of hand gestures (check out this video highlighting 60 of our most common ones).

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At a very important football game, a man notices that a much better seat than his is empty, so he approaches the man sitting there.

“Is this spot free?"

"Well, it is the spot reserved for my wife’s subscription, but she is dead now, so please, take a seat.”

“Thank you, that is very generous. But may I ask why you didn’t give the seat to a family member or a friend?”

“Oh, I will do it next Sunday. Today, everyone is at her funeral.”

2. We love our football above everything else.

And we’d sooner give up a finger than the idea of having invented football.

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A man dies and arrives in Heaven. While standing in line in front of the pearly gates, he notices a gentleman with blue lips, shaking with cold.

“Goodness! What happened to you?”

“I froze to death. How about you?”

“Oh, I died of happiness!”

“Happiness? How does that even work?”

“Well, I suspected for months that my wife cheated on me. Today I managed to surprise her and came home earlier from work. I found her in bed, naked. So I went on and looked all over our apartment for her lover: under the bed, in the closet, on the balcony, in the bathroom, behind the curtains, in the cupboards even! But I found nothing. I was so happy with the news that I got a heart attack.”

“You idiot! If only you checked in the freezer too, we’d both still be alive!”

3. We are passionate by nature… but prone to cheating.

Maybe it’s just the Latin lover passionate nature of ours... or is it that we’re tired of coming second to football?

In 2014, 55% of Italian men and 44% of Italian women admitted to having cheated at least once, averaging 49,5%. In 2017, the numbers rose to 58% on average, qualifying us as the most cheating country in Europe. Yikes!

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Did you guess all the stereotypes? Are they true in your experience?

And what stereotypes hide in the jokes your fellow countrymen tell about themselves?

Share it in a comment!