There are a number of Italian terms and expressions that are difficult to translate into English. A few examples: the word sfizio, meaning to indulge in an impulse just for the hell of it; sprezzatura, a studied attitude of carelessness; scarpetta, mopping up the remaining sauce on a plate with a hunk of bread. And then there are some that take more than a few words to explain (more like, say, a 1,200-word article), ones that encompass an entire peninsula-wide subculture: one such is tamarro, both an adjective and a trait noun, which, more than a word, is an entire lifestyle onto itself.  

Tamarri seem to always travel in a pack, their Nike Shox sneakers, or preferably the 2Chainz x Versace patchwork ones, hitting the pavement in tandem with the sort of lazy, swingy walk some might call “swagger”. The pants are most always jeans, though track pants might make an appearance. The former are shredded, ripped, and skinny–bonus points if they’re white–and pulled a few centimeters below the hips, held in place by an ostentatious belt. An initialed buckle is a must–usually an “LV” for Louis Vuitton or the interlocking Gucci “G”–as is a patterned strap; checkered is a fan-favorite, though a recognizable Louis Vuitton or Gucci print, to go with the respective buckles, will do. Up top, we have perhaps that most identifiable tamarro item of them all: the designer t-shirt. Emporio Armani, Gucci, Palm Angels–the bigger the logo, the better. Top it all off with gaudy designer sunnies, a designer baseball cap, designer bag (crossbody or fanny), and a spritz of Dior Sauvage Eau de Parfum “per uomo”. (Though there certainly are female tamarre–think the Louis Vuitton bauletto, or over-the-knee boots with hyper-mini skirts–it’s a term with overwhelmingly male connotations.) 

There were a few tamarri staples in the early 2000s when this culture truly peaked: the A-Style t-shirt on which the logo was a not-so-subtle representation of two stick figures engaging in coitus, the inexplicably ubiquitous American college-style Rams 23 hoodie, and, worst of all, the ANGELDEVIL jeans with angel wings printed on the buttcheeks. 

Curiously, some haute Italian fashion houses cater extensively to tamarro aesthetics, offering lower-market items to tap into the demand–most notably Gucci, Versace, Dolce & Gabbana, and Emporio Armani. A “plain” tee from one of these brands can cost a few hundred euros–an amount that tamarri are willing to dish out, as branding is of the utmost importance. Ostentatiousness and over-the-top exhibitions of wealth mark the aesthetic: it’s not the high-quality cotton, nor the fit science, that drive their purchasing habits, but, above all, the logo, useless if it’s not on full display. In this way, tamarraggine–yes, we have a noun form of it as well, meaning “tamarro-ness”–is the antithesis of last year’s buzz word “quiet luxury”. 

Tamarraggine, rather, is loud, like the music its proponents listen to–usually the worst of what is popular during any given zeitgeist. Think Gabry-Ponte-style commercial EDM in the early 2000s, or trap music more recently. The club is a major hub of the tamarri, and if they can reserve a table and pop some bottles, all the better.

Though “tamarro” is ubiquitous in the Italian lexicon, the word is not of Latin descent, but of Arabic: “tammār”, meaning “date merchant”, referred to an individual of low social standing, a trader coming to the city from the countryside, attempting to enrich himself. Originating in southern Italy–where Arab influence is strong linguistically, culturally, and gastronomically–“tamarro” eventually substituted “villano”, a demeaning word for a person from rural areas, roughly equivalent to the English “villain”, with both originating from the Latin “villanus” (interesting to note the running thread of outsiders being perceived negatively). The fact that this term came to be derogatory reeks of classism, and reminds this writer of the English language term “new money”, literally referring to those who have come to their means (relatively) recently but also encompassing a culture of gaudiness. The concept is perhaps best summed up in The Lions of Sicily, the new series based on Stefania Auci’s best-selling book The Florios of Sicily: when self-made Calabrian merchant Vincenzo Florio invites the entirety of the Palermitan aristocracy for dinner, the latter turn up their noses at the overdone glitziness of his house, with one remarking, “The greater the effort, the further away you get from it.”

Likewise, tamarraggine is most prevalent amongst the “new money” and working classes, with many saving up specifically to purchase luxury goods or choosing counterfeit (the Italian market for counterfeit products reached a staggering 8.7 billion euros in 2019). Even so, tamarraggine refers more to an aesthetic than to a class description, one that many high-profile Italians, especially footballers, count themselves members of too. 

When a concept spreads throughout Italy, regional variants of the word start popping up like mushrooms. “Tamarro” is the most understood throughout the peninsula, along with “zarro” and “truzzo”, but there are endless variations of the word throughout the country: “gabibbo” comes from the Eritrean “habib” (“friend from far away”) and is the form used in Genoa, which, through cultural proximity, transformed into the “gabillo” used in Sardinia. In Rome they use “coatto”, or “boro”; in Bologna, “maraglio”; in Naples, “cuozzo”. And then, rather infamously, we have the Milanese variation, “maranza”, which has a characteristically un-PC origin: the fusion of the words “marocchino” (“Moroccan”) and “zanza”, a local slang for a scammer or hustler. The term was coined by the paninari of Milan in the 1980s to refer to those they perceived as hoodlums (though arguably the paninari were not so different from tamarri, at least in spirit).

It’s this flavor of tamarro that has caused a stir in recent years. These maranze are characterized by Lacoste and Nike tracksuits (the top being zipped up to their chins), puffer vests, branded bumbags (the “sacoche”), hair cut to a fade, and, without fail, Nike TN sneakers–a veritable “outfit drip” (pronounced dreep), as they would say. The genre is perhaps best celebrated by the 2018 Italodance anthem “La danza dei maranza” by Alex Teddy and Dance Rocker, which honors clubbing, the “night”, and “people who dance”. While initially gaining popularity in satirical contexts online–a viral meme imagined all maranze responding to the intro of Gambino’s “Alicante” like a bat signal–”maranza” began to take on negative connotations in mainstream media discourse in 2022. In the midst of Milan’s “baby gang” crisis–an uptick in street assaults and theft at the hands of local youth–news outlets latched onto this internet trend, using the “maranza” as a “synonym for ‘baby gang,’ almost as if to rebrand the alleged emergency,” as Vincenzo Marino argues in an article titled “From tamarro to bully in tracksuit with purse: who is the ‘maranza’ today” for Vice. Portrayals linked the term to youth slang, criminality, and, especially by right-wing publications, even draw connections with specific ethnic backgrounds–an easy scapegoat for the metropolis’s rise in violence. Where the word will develop from here remains to be seen. 

While I insisted on tamarraggine as an Italian concept, I don’t mean to say that there are no tamarri abroad; in fact, the world is full of them, existing as different, more specific subcultures. The chavs of England would never be associated with the guidos from the Jersey Shore, but to Italian eyes they are all based on similar principles: tamarri, in international forms.