Lost in Translation, Or: What on earth is she saying?

I'm extremely lucky: I grew up in the same house as my maternal grandparents, and my paternal grandmother was also close by. My maternal grandma had also grown up with her maternal grandparents (we're a matriarchy in this family), both of whom immigrated from Basilicata, and so I had the amazing fortune of learning about Lucanian (Basilicatese) traditions through the memories of someone who was more directly immersed in them.

This meant that not only do I have some amazing recipes passed down to me, but certain words and phrases have been a part of my and my family's lexicon since time immemorial - to the point where I didn't realize other people didn't say them regularly. Some of these are fairly common in Italian-American parlance (e.g., "Affanable!" = my family's variation on "A fa Napoli!"), some are quirks of what got passed down in my particular family (e.g. "faschiv" - pron. "fash-keev" - meaning disgusting and which seems to be derived from "fa schifo" or "schifare" in Italian), and some are just things my family said (e.g. "Cumu si bella fatta?" or "How did you get so beautiful?" was a common refrain from my great-grandmother. The correct answer, of course, was "because I take after my great-grandmother.").

And, of course, there are the hand signals. The thumb and index fingers twisting into your right cheek to say something is tasty. The pinched fingers to say everything from "what are you doing to me?" to "what's wrong with you?" to "for goodness sakes!"

But recently, I found this. Here is a picture of my great-great-grandmother, Mariantonia. We've met her a few times via marriage records and the world's greatest picture ever.

What is that hand gesture? The "Shame on you, Ma" scrawled at the top makes me think it's not polite....but for the life of me, I cannot determine what it means.

So really, this post is a call for help. I'm putting up on the bat signal. Can anyone identify what this means for me?