Cultural conventions of sympathy

Today I went out in Florence to buy a sympathy card. I went to a number of different card shops and found cards for birthdays, marriages, new babies, retirement, graduation, love - everything but death. I started to wonder (not seriously) if they don’t have the problem of death here in Italy.

Finally I asked a sales assistant if he had any cards for sympathy. My Italian failed me at that point, but thankfully he helped me out by speaking English.

He brought out some small, plain white cards each with a single black stripe across the corner. He said in Italy people usually send these cards. I have learnt since that people often send a flower (or flowers) with the card.

In Australia, sympathy cards usually have soft colours and flowing cursive writing. Unfortunately, many have sappy words that you wouldn’t want to send to anyone. Flowers (roses, lilies, sometimes a whole garden), sometimes doves or butterflies, and swirly abstract shapes are the most common motifs used.

The Italian cards are much more stark. In some ways the semiotic of plain white with a bit of black is very sober and realistic about the finality of death itself.

The floral-ness of the Australian cards is perhaps intended to communicate instead something about the conventions of responding to death, i.e. often by giving flowers. The ugliness of death is hidden behind a curtain of artificial floral beauty.