It is an unspoken code somehow between family members and “paisans”. So, if you’re going out and your top isn’t exactly what your parents, siblings or grandmother thinks is apropos, then they will tell you “Ma where are you going looking like that?”
So, if you’re a strong willed, independent person you’ll wave back, pretend you didn’t hear them and walk out the door!
If you’re stuck in that mode of pleasing others, then you will turn back and go change!
Because God forbid someone would see you and then comment to others about not looking a certain way and it got back to your family! This would begin a chain that goes something like this: “Does she not know how to dress anymore” to “You’d think she’d know better to go out looking like that!” These comments get back to “la famiglia” and as they are negative in nature, they feel it reflects upon them, hence living your life for others, always!
The opposite is “una bella figura” whereby you’re making a good impression and everyone wants that!
For many Italians, the brutta figura is the ultimate insult or shame against their name.
It ranges from: how people don’t say anything to anyone if a family member has a disease, goes into the hospital, or worse getting a divorce.
Somehow it’s always worse for women, as in the Italian culture whatever goes wrong is ultimately the woman’s fault! I remember growing up, if you had a baby girl some would cry and carry on that it wasn’t a boy. Little did they know that it’s the man who determines the sex of a baby.
It’s a strange phenomenon how even today it’s so ingrained into the head of many that the younger generations are still following this ‘unspoken” rule. To live one’s life based on always having to make a good impression results in oppression and repression and that volcano explodes at some point and then you end making the ultimate brutta figura!
So, live you life as you desire and send anyone who says anything “a quel altro paese”
« Okay, that's it.
