In Italian, food is rarely just food. It organizes time, relationships, and expectations. This column explores Italian sayings and proverbs as ways of thinking shaped at the table.
These expressions preserve that knowledge in compact form. Read literally, they speak about eating. Read more closely, they offer insight into how experience, pleasure, and social life are understood.
The aim is simple: to treat language as another ingredient—handled with care, tasted slowly, and shared. No prior appetite required. It tends to arrive along the way.
Avere gli occhi foderati di prosciutto
Literal translation: "To have one’s eyes lined with prosciutto"
Meaning: To ignore what is plainly in front of you, usually because seeing it would be uncomfortable
The image is immediate—almost cartoonish—and for that very reason unforgettable. Italian doesn’t merely suggest that something is slipping past our sight; it points to the cause and names it outright: a slice of prosciutto. Reality is right there, in front of our eyes, yet something gets in the way and prevents us from seeing it clearly. This is no abstract obstacle. It has weight, texture, color, even a familiar smell. And it is precisely this concreteness that makes the expression instantly intelligible, even to someone encountering it for the first time.
In Italian, thinking is never entirely separate from eating. Cognition passes through the table. And so the mind—much like the body after a generous meal—can feel a little heavier, slightly foggy, less ready to focus.
The most convincing explanation of the expression’s origin appears in the Dizionario della lingua italiana (1861) by Niccolò Tommaseo and Bernardo Bellini. There, the image is traced back to a medical condition: inflamed eyelids, turned outward, reddened and swollen, obstructing vision. Over time, the medical reference faded, but the image remained. The pathology disappeared; the prosciutto stayed.
In contemporary Italy, avere gli occhi foderati di prosciutto is a widely used expression, but it is not a generic way of talking about distraction or poor perception. It does not refer to missing a nuance or overlooking a minor detail. Rather, it is used when what goes unseen is obvious to everyone else—so obvious that failing to notice it feels almost impossible. The expression surfaces when reality insists on being what it is, and someone, stubbornly, keeps looking the other way.
This is a very particular kind of blindness. It doesn’t come from a defect of the eyes themselves, but from how we choose to position ourselves in front of certain things. Sometimes it is simple naïveté: a sincere belief that reality must be different from how it appears. Other times it is a form of self-protection, a way of shielding oneself from what would hurt too much to acknowledge openly. To really look, in those moments, would mean accepting an uncomfortable truth and altering a status quo that, until then, had felt tolerable.
That is why the expression so easily oscillates between irony and accusation. It can make you smile, but it also lands with a punch. The prosciutto over the eyes is not an accident. It is something we allow to stay there—sometimes out of “convenience”—at least for a while.
This is also why the expression finds one of its most familiar settings in romantic relationships, especially in stories of betrayal. Everyone sees it. Everyone knows. Everyone comments on it—everyone, that is, except the one person who should be seeing it first. The signs are all there, obvious and repeated: excuses that no longer hold, habits that suddenly change, absences that multiply.
This is not a matter of intelligence, but of trust—or fear. One doesn’t look because looking would change everything. And change, in those circumstances, rarely promises improvement.
Italian uses food even to talk about what weighs on us. You may smile, of course. But some truths, even when they smell wonderful, are still hard to swallow.
Read Samuel Ghelli's first Appetito Magazine article below:
