We most commonly call it pizzica, tarantella but it’s also known as taranta. It is the hypnotic, mesmerizing music of Salento, in Puglia, with varieties of its dramatic rhythm – and of the dance style that goes with it – popular also in other areas of our South, especially in Campania.
While Italophiles and Italians all over the world are familiar with this music and dancing style, not many may know its fascinating history, which delves deep into mysterious rituals of catharsis and religion. Even fewer people are probably aware that a study on its development and social role, carried out by Ernesto de Martino in the 1950s, became the foundation of Italy’s modern cultural anthropology.
The origins of taranta get lost in time but are rooted in the land of Salento and in the rhythms and habits of its farmers, in their primordial and often mysterious relationship with nature, spirituality, and healing. The first attestation of the use of music and dancing to cure the bite of venomous spiders is found in medical treatises dating to the 14th century. However, two centuries later medicine embraced a more scientific and orthodox approach to tarantism which was then viewed as a mental illness connected with epilepsy and hysteria. Francesco Serao, a 17th-century medical doctor, was clear about the causes of the illness, which was to be sought “not in tarantulas, but in the Apulian people.”
But in the mind of the farming society of Puglia, tarantism and its cure, taranta music and dancing, remained, well into the 20th century, associated with the bite of a poisonous spider, the tarantola, common in the South of Italy. Nothing more, nothing less. Often, tradition says, during harvest season, people would get bitten by tarantole and would suffer horrible symptoms: pains all over the body, delirium, fever, depression. Often, they would fall into a full catatonic state. No medicine could help tarantolati resurface from their limbo: they were lost to their family and friends, just as if they died.
The only cure for their state was music: the incessant, obsessive sound of the tambourine – as well as violins and guitars – that would accompany, often for weeks at a time, the wild dancing of the tarantolato. Through frenzied movements and the cleansing power of music, the spider’s venom was eventually expelled from the victim’s body, who could then return to live a normal life. Taranta was, to the eyes of the people who practiced it and believed in it, a bona fide exorcism, where music had the power to cleanse evil, in this case, the tarantola’s venom, from the tarantolato’s blood, giving them back their humanity and their ability to function within society.
This is the legend of how taranta music and dance were born, or better, this is the explanation our ancestors gave to the malaise and pain of tarantolati, which were eventually healed through music and dancing. But what is the truth behind it all?
Now, it’s important to clarify one point: tarantolati did exist in our profound South and they were cured with taranta music and dancing. But it’s the root of the illness we should observe more closely and try to explain. This is exactly what Italian anthropologist and historian of religions Ernesto de Martino and a group of researchers did in the 1950s. De Martino and his team studied the phenomenon “on the field” for almost 10 years, forming the basis of the most complete scientific study of the phenomenon ever produced, a study that, still today, is part of the curriculum of almost every anthropology student in Italy.
De Martino came to the conclusion that tarantism, a phenomenon he circumscribed to the Salento region of Puglia, had some specific characteristics and that, crucially, it was not caused by the bite of a spider at all. The hypothetical bite usually would happen in the summer and women were much more likely to be victims of tarantulas than men. De Martino also noticed that, usually, tarantolati belonged to families of lower social extraction and little education, and that the first bites usually coincided with the beginning of puberty. Soon, it became clear: tarantism wasn’t caused by the bite of a spider but was the somatization of psychological distress caused in young individuals by the effects of too strict an upbringing on the urges, emotions, and needs of adolescence. It was a symbolic ritual, one that was rooted in the psychological needs of a community. To underline the ritual, rather than strictly medical, nature of tarantism we need to mention only one thing: it returned every Summer. If the tarantula “bit” you once, you were bitten forever.
Of course, I am making it very simple here, but if the anthropological side of the story interests you, do look for de Martino’s work, La Terra del Rimorso, which is widely available in English as The Land of Remorse, with a translation by Dorothy Zinn.
With time and a better understanding of the psychological mechanism behind tarantism, taranta became what we know today: a type of music and a type of dance. The dance, known as taranta or pizzica, with its frenzied hypnotic movements, imitates the behavior of the old-fashioned tarantolati, who were “possessed” by venom. Musicians, with their tambourines, violins, and guitars, are like exorcists because they help the people free themselves from fears and stress through music and dance. This is the intimate beauty of taranta: it is a music of freedom, a hymn to the incredible energy of life.
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