Tarantism and Pizzica: The Women Bitten by the Spider
Today the pizzica is a celebration: tambourines, packed piazzas, thousands of people dancing under the stars at the Notte della Taranta. But behind this music lies a far older and far darker story, one of sun-scorched fields, of hard labour, and above all of women. To truly understand Salento, it's worth getting to know it.
The Spider and the Fields
For centuries, in rural Salento, there was a phenomenon known as tarantism. During the summer harvest, out under the blazing sun, those working the fields would tell of being bitten by the taranta, a spider. Those affected — overwhelmingly women — fell into a state of deep distress: agitation, convulsions, melancholy, sometimes a torpor from which there seemed no way out.
The "bite" wasn't always a verifiable medical fact. But the pain was real, and the community had only one way to confront it: music.
The Pizzica as a Cure
When someone "was taken by the taranta," the musicians were called for. They arrived with fiddle, button accordion and, above all, the tambourine, and began to play the pizzica: a tight, hypnotic, tireless rhythm.
The bitten woman — the tarantata — would begin to dance. She might dance for hours, sometimes for days, until utterly exhausted. That frantic movement was believed to "work off" the venom, to free the body of whatever possessed it. It was a collective therapy: family, neighbours and musicians all took part in the ritual, right through to the final release.
Saint Paul and the Chapel in Galatina
Tarantism had a sacred dimension too. The tarantate made a pilgrimage to the chapel of Saint Paul, in Galatina, regarded as a protector against bites and poisons. On 29 June, the feast of Saints Peter and Paul, they would go there to ask for grace and to drink the water from the well. Popular faith and ancient ritual fused into a single, intense hope of healing.
Tarantella or Pizzica?
The two terms are often confused. The tarantella is the generic name for a great family of dances from Southern Italy. The pizzica is its Salento variant, and the one tied to tarantism is known as the pizzica tarantata. There are other forms too — the courtship pizzica, danced as a couple, and the spectacular pizzica scherma, a dance-duel — but it is the healing pizzica from which it all began. It's no coincidence that the great festival is named after the taranta itself.
What the Scholars Saw
This story was made famous by the anthropologist Ernesto de Martino, who studied the phenomenon in the field during the 1950s and turned it into a landmark book, La terra del rimorso (1961). De Martino read tarantism not merely as superstition, but as a cultural language: a way for the voiceless to express a profound inner suffering.
It is no accident that those who were "bitten" were mostly women. In a harsh society where they had precious little freedom, the ritual of the taranta became the one moment in which they were allowed to cry out, to thrash and flail, to be heard. Music gave shape and dignity to a suffering that would otherwise have stayed silent.
From Cure to Stage
With modernization and the arrival of modern medicine, tarantism gradually faded over the twentieth century. For a time, the pizzica itself seemed destined to be forgotten.
Then, from the 1990s onward, came the revival. The pizzica returned — no longer as a cure but as identity: festive music, the symbol of a people rediscovering its roots. In 1998 the Notte della Taranta was born, today one of the largest folk-music festivals in Europe, which every summer brings the ancient sound of the tambourine back to Melpignano, in the heart of the Grecìa Salentina.
To dance the pizzica today means this too: keeping alive the memory of those women in the fields. Staying in this land, just minutes from Melpignano, is the most authentic way to feel how alive this story still is.