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Tarantella () is a group of various Southern Italy folk dances originating in the regions of Calabria, Campania, Sicilia, and Apulia. It is characterized by a fast upbeat tempo, usually in Time signature (sometimes or ), accompanied by .Morehead, P.D., Bloomsbury Dictionary of Music, London, Bloomsbury, 1992. It is among the most recognized forms of traditional southern Italian music. The specific dance-name varies with every region, for instance sonu a ballu in Calabria, tammurriata in Campania, and pizzica in Salento. Tarantella is popular in southern Italy, Greece, and Malta. The term may appear as tarantello in a linguistically masculine construction.
In the Italian province of Taranto (taking its name from Tarantas), Apulia, the bite of a locally common type of Lycosa tarantula, Lycosa tarantula ( Lycos in Greek means 'wolf'), named "tarantula" after the region,Carl Linnaeus named the spider Lycosa tarantula in 1758. was popularly believed to be highly venomous and to lead to a hysterical condition known as tarantism. This type of dance became known as the tarantella. R. Lowe Thompson proposed that the dance is a survival from a "Dianic or Dionysus cult", driven underground.R.Lowe Thompson. The History of the Devil. Paul, Trench, Tubner, and Co. (1929), p. 164. John Compton later proposed that the Roman Senate had suppressed these ancient Bacchanalia Ritual. In 186 BC, the tarantella went underground, reappearing under the guise of emergency therapy for bite victims.John Compton. The Life of the Spider. Mentor Books (1954), p. 56f.
The dance originated in the Apulia region, and spread throughout the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. The Neapolitan tarantella is a courtship dance performed by couples whose "rhythms, melodies, gestures, and accompanying songs are quite distinct" featuring faster more cheerful music. Its origins may further lie in "a fifteenth-century fusion between the Spanish Fandango and the Moresca ballo di sfessartia". The "magico-religious" tarantella is a solo dance performed supposedly to cure through perspiration the delirium and contortions attributed to the bite of a spider at harvest (summer) time. The dance was later applied as a supposed cure for the behavior of neurotic women ( carnevaletto delle donne).Ettlinger, Ellen (1965). Review of "La Tarantella Napoletana" by Renato Penna ( Rivista di Etnografia), Man, Vol. 65 (Sep. – Oct. 1965), p. 176.
There are several traditional tarantella groups: Cantori di Carpino, Officina Zoé, Uccio Aloisi gruppu, Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino, Selva Cupina, and I Tamburellisti di Torrepaduli.
The tarantella is most frequently played with a mandolin, a guitar, an accordion, and ; flute, fiddle, trumpet, and clarinet are also used.
The tarantella is a dance in which the dancer and the drum player constantly try to upstage each other by playing faster or dancing longer than the other, subsequently tiring one person out first.
A convulsion infuriated the human frame .... Entire communities of people would join hands, dance, leap, scream, and shake for hours .... Music appeared to be the only means of combating the strange epidemic ... lively, shrill tunes, played on trumpets and fifes, excited the dancers; soft, calm harmonies, graduated from fast to slow, high to low, prove efficacious for the cure.Hecker, Justus. Quoted in Sear, H. G. (1939).The music used against spider bites featured drums and , was matched to the pace of the victim, and is only weakly connected to its later depiction in the tarantellas of Chopin, Franz Liszt, Rossini, and Heller.Sear, H. G. (1939). "Music and Medicine", p. 45, Music & Letters, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Jan. 1939), pp. 43–54. Note that Sear may mistake the Neapolitan and Apulian tarantellas and that those by Romantic composers to which he refers may have been intended as Neapolitan.
While most serious proponents speculated as to the direct physical benefits of the dancing rather than the power of the music, a mid-18th century medical textbook gets the prevailing story backwards, describing that tarantulas will be compelled to dance by violin music. It was thought that the Lycosa tarantula wolf spider had lent the name "tarantula" to tarantula, having been the species associated with Taranto, but since L. tarantula is not inherently deadly, the highly venomous Mediterranean black widow, Latrodectus tredecimguttatus, may have been the species originally associated with Taranto's manual grain harvest.
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