Traditions of Salento, Apulia, south Italy

See more information of Tarantismo, Pizzica, Tipical Popular Music of Salento

After the vague approaches of the last centuries, nowadays the study of Salento’s popular traditions bewitches all the world.
Only here there’s the survival of a unique religious ritual characterized by peculiar symbols, original magic-religious beliefs and a peculiar music: tarantism.

THE TARANTULA BITE

Tarantism is a particular phenomenon connected with the popular music of Southern Salento.

It has very old origins, even mythological; it comes from very probably by the heathen rites and by the orgiastic cults of Magna Graecia. While its Christianized form is greatly connected with the worship of St. Paul, the patron saint of Galatina where there is a chapel in his honour.

Tarantism is named after a spider rather diffuse in Salento, the TARANTULA, usually safe, but according to legend, the one diffuse in Puglia was very venomous. It’s narrated that its bite caused an illness almost like madness, today we could define it a kind of mental fit with the characteristics of neurotic hysteria.
This phenomenon happened especially in the months of july and august, when the intense hot gave new life to the venom that was in the blood of the people bitten by the animal. The sick people, who were especially women, were called “tarantati”.

The only way to avoid madness, sensation of soffocation and even death was music: a haunting music caused in sick people convulsive rhythmical movements by which they shook the venom of the tarantula off or at least they were convinced of that.
Music was the best therapy for the “tarantati”. The players went to the houses of sick people and played for hours a melody repeated quickly and sometimes they alternated, always with the same rhythm, dialect love songs.

The musical instruments used were violins, tambourines and barrel organs. If the fit lasted for days the players took turns. This “dance” and this obsessing shaking caused the liberation from the illness that came only when the sick person fell to the ground exhausted but liberated from the “spells” caused by the tarantula bite.
Really the incessant music came into the heads and the thoughts of the sick people who freed themselves from their neuroses with the convulsive shakings.
This kind of music was later called “tarantata” or “pizzica tarantata”. The therapy included also a special symbolism of colours, in fact the sick people often gripped red ribbons or handkerchiefs in their hands and waved them.

The rite of “Tarantate” is also connected with the worship of St. Paul, the patron saint of Galatina and protector from the bite of snakes and venomous insects. According to legend the saint wanted to reward the man who had given him ospitality in Galatina giving the water of his well a therapeutic power: drinking the miraculous water and invoking the saint in the chapel dedicated to him would have assured the sick person a certain recovery from the bites of venomous beasts.

For this reason the “tarantate” (women suffering from tarantism) got used to going to the chapel of the patron saint St. Paul on the 28th and 29th of june, dates of the celebration of the saint: they visited the small church, danced wildly and asked St. Paul to free them from the venoms of the tarantulas. Sometimes the sick people ran frenetically in the streets of the town, then met and started to dance jumping for hours or even for days. Sometimes the dance became also choreographic.

Today the phenomenon of “tarantism” has almost disappeared and there are only a very few women who go on dancing. Some studies have shown analogies with similar phenomenons in Spain, Sicily and Sardinia.
For a long time tarantism was considered almost a shame by the inhabitants of Galatina.

Historians of international renown coming from all the world have been interested in this phenomenon as a fact of costume and cuture.
It’s worth mentioning the work of the ethnologists Ernesto De Martino and Diego Carpitella who collected testimonies and tried to interpret this local phenomenon in “Land of remorse” between 1959 and 1960. The short film “Journey in Galatina” of G. Santoro and R. Durante is a classic. The latest reading of tarantism from a modern viewpoint can be found in the film “Pizzicata” of the director Edoardo Winspeare who has drawn his inspiration from atavic traditions.

Today there aren’t “tarantate” anylonger but the haunting music that had to cure them has remained in the air. The music of Tarantism has hovered from Galatina and has exploded in a thousand fragments fallen on the whole Salento where they have taken various facets. Today the “pizzica tarantata” is danced in squares, discotheques, clubs, everywhere … It’s played and sung by various local groups, even by the symphony orchestra “Tito Schipa” of the province of Lecce.

The “pizzica tarantata” has become music, ethnomusic, literature, tradition, folklore, cultural heritage and … identity of Salento.