🎶 Summer 2025 in Salento: the revival of pizzica

Summer 2025 in Salento (Italy) (one of the most popular destinations in recent years) promises to be rich with events for lovers of pizzica (the traditional music of Salento) and folk traditions. The season kicks off with the Notte della Taranta tour, which spans over 19 stops across the towns of the Grecìa Salentina and culminates on August 23 with the grand Concertone in Melpignano, conducted this year by Maestro Concertatore David Krakauer. Alongside the main festival, evenings dedicated to pizzica will take place in locations such as Torrepaduli, Porto Cesareo, Galatina, and Alberobello, featuring workshops, performances, and communal ritual dances.

These events renew the ritual and symbolic tradition of Salento’s dance, creating a bridge between past and present: a collective rite deeply rooted in tarantism, the therapeutic and symbolic phenomenon that gave birth to pizzica itself.

Tarantismo: a cultural phenomenon of southern Italy

Tarantismo is an ancient folk phenomenon prevalent mainly in Salento (Apulia) and some other areas of southern Italy from which the Pizzica Salentina is derived. It manifested during the summer (wheat harvesting period) as a syndrome of psychophysical malaise. According to tradition, tarantism arose from the "bite" of the tarantula (a symbolic spider), which - while harmless - was used to explain states of prostration, depression, pain and hysterical fits in peasant women. The "tarantula" was almost always an unmarried young woman, and to her suffering the community responded with a complex domestic therapeutic ritual: a group ritual based on a rhythmic, musical, choreutic and chromatic apparatus that included tambourines, whirling dances, ritual objects and bright colors.

Ernesto De Martino and the research on tarantism

Anthropologist Ernesto De Martino (1908-1965) brought the scientific study of tarantism to light in the 1950s. In 1959 he led an expedition to Salento, along with other scholars such as musicologist Diego Carpitella, and collected evidence, photos and sound recordings of the phenomenon. The result was the monograph La terra del rimorso (1961), in which De Martino interpreted tarantismo as a symbolic cultural phenomenon rather than a simple physical pathology. In this study he emphasized that the episode of the alleged bite had no zoological basis, but was rather the "rupture of a pre-established order," that is, the symptom of a "cultural evil" within a peasant society marked by poverty and frustration; the mythology of the taranta and the exorcistic dance allowed for the public dramatization of psychological tensions (frustrations-most prominently, frustration with labor in the fields and frustration with women's inferior position in society, unhappy loves, bereavements, frustrations) and offered the dancer a kind of catharsis that reintegrated him or her into the community. Thanks to this historicist and interdisciplinary perspective, De Martino framed tarantismo in the magical-religious context of southern Italy, emphasizing the syncretism between paganism and Christianity typical of the place

The therapeutic ritual: music and dance

In the traditional treatment of tarantism, music and dance played a key therapeutic role. The pizzica salentina or tarantella salentina was the frenetic dance played mainly with the tambourine and other percussion instruments. De Martino called this rite a true "musical exorcism": the tarantolato was made to dance nonstop until reaching a state of trance, thus releasing "the evil humors" of the alleged poison and restoring psychophysical balance. According to folk tradition, some skilled musicians were "able, with music, to heal or at least soothe the state of 'pizzicata,'" experimenting with combinations of rhythm and notes, one had to reach the same rhythm as the spider to 'exorcise' the tarantula. The tambourine players accompanied the movement of the tarantulas as the entire community participated in the event: they played, sang and danced together to watch over the healing. In many historical accounts, the haunting music and collective dancing were seen as a means of releasing repressed emotions, transforming personal evil into collective catharsis. Sometimes the "exorcists" also arranged colorful ribbons, handkerchiefs, and bright fabrics (a kind of folk chromotherapy whose spider color had to be found) to stimulate the senses during the therapeutic ritual.

Symbolic and religious implications

Tarantism had profound symbolic and syncretic meanings also , in part, handed down or/and evolved from Greek Bacchic cults; Its earliest written sources date back to the 17th-18th centuries (such as the Antidotum Tarantulae, a therapeutic musical ritual considered an antidote to the symptoms caused by the "tarantula" bite), but it has its roots in the Middle Ages. The belief in the tarantula bite metaphorically represented various anxieties (love, social, existential) and the triggering event was interpreted as a sacred sign. The healing practice combined pagan elements (orphic rites, propitiatory dances) with local Christian religiosity. In Salento, for example, a syncretic cult developed around St. Paul: aware of the rite's pre-Christian roots, the Church channeled the tarantulas into the chapel of St. Paul in Galatina (setting the celebration for June 29) while leaving the therapeutic music and dance intact. As scholar H. Moschetto notes, "the practice of popular exorcism of the taranta is founded on a superstition that syncretizes Catholicism and paganism" and is based on faith in a communication between the visible and invisible. The ritual purpose was to bring the sick person into a trance to expel the symbolic poison and heal not only the body but the soul. An ancient musical score from 1832 (by Johann F. Hecker) shows how different "modes" of tarantella were codified as early as the 19th century, revealing the interest of European scholars in this ancient ritual. Ultimately, the dance and music of tarantism were not mere entertainment: they were "healing dances" that exalted the body as it fell and rose again, representing a path of collective purification.

Social and economic context

Tarantismo must be understood in the socio-economic context of rural Apulia in the past. Great poverty, the drudgery of summer farm work and harsh living conditions were recurrent stressors. According to De Martino, the bite of the tarantula symbolically represented "the disruption of an established order" due to this discomfort, and the ritual constituted an institutionalized communal protection of it. Often the victims of tarantism were unmarried women frustrated by toil and social conflict; the ritual also had an implicit erotic-sexual dimension (this shines through in folk songs) that brought into play the pairs order/conflict and health/disease within the agrarian community. Among the folds of this tradition can be traced remnants of ancient Mediterranean cultures (cult of Demeter or Dionysus) that adapted to the poor climate of the Mezzogiorno: as recalled by some sources, Apulia itself offered an "economic-social context favorable to the taking root" of such ritual practices. In practice, tarantism was a form of collective resilience: a social way of expressing and healing individual anxieties, operating psychological integration through the community.

Cultural legacy

The era of "historical" tarantismo came to an end with the rural modernization of the 20th century, but the memory of the ritual survives, though changed, as an element of cultural identity. Today the pizzica and tarantella have undergone a popular revival (think of festivals such as the Notte della Taranta) as a folkloric expression and vindication of southern heritage, the swirling rhythms of the pizzica resonate no longer only in village festivals, but also in weddings, fashion shows, festivals and concerts where ancient and modern meet. To put it bluntly, we can say that in the new millennium the pizzica has been affected by globalization and media influence, which have made the pizzica itself a tourist attraction and a mass phenomenon, thus detaching it from its origins, traditions, cult and Tarantismo. Regarding the anthropological aspect, De Martino's study remains fundamental to understanding this complex phenomenon: his multidisciplinary research showed how Tarantismo was not a simple superstition but a healing ritual with deep roots in the social and symbolic fabric of Southern Italy

See also: E. De Martino, La terra del rimorso, 1961.

Sources: Anthropological studies and historical sources on tarantismo and Ernesto De Martino