The origins of the tarantella

Rhythm, in the lands of southern Italy, has always been linked to a bloody dance, a dance ghettoized or prohibited, the tarantella, and for live or survive are forced to justify itself as a healing practice as an altered state, a kind of exorcism in music to drive away the demon that has invaded and the tarantato.

The myth of the tarantula, black spider in the legend that bites and forces to the ball, so was born in the era medieval obscurantism when divinitàpagane of Ancient Greece are silenced by the new apostles of a more rational religion and composed, austere and chastened. Dionisio Bacchus and Apollo, gods of unbridled rituals from wine, poetry and eros disappear in the new culture that denies the classical hedonism for medieval mysticism.

And so the public celebrations of the pagan god, the feast of the god who dances, we go to the party hidden God who forgives, represented by his apostle St. Paul protector of tarantati in enclosed courtyards or in the churchyard of Galatina basilica which the saint is dedicated and welcoming and assisting the victims of the tarantula in the final stages of healing.
The history of the tarantella is therefore the history of repression, a repression that starts from the hegemonic culture and hits the peasant culture, ancient and stubbornly linked to myths and rituals of the earth and the stars.
And the dominant culture tolerates barely residues practice that fails to eradicate altogether and in the Council of Trent the rhythm is banished from music as demonic element.
But in the meantime, although the tarantella in the undergrowth of the most marginalized rural culture, continues to function, to heal and to lead us into temptation. And the popular musicians continue to play for hours on their percussion and recreating with flutes with lire or voice their sensual melodies. And when and where the tarantato there, those tools and those notes ring out again and spread to villages and regions and strained voices and rhythms grueling bouncing from one valley and spread throughout the peninsula.
And the evenings in the courtyards of the farms and festivals in the villages are animated by the music of the tarantella, and the tarantella dance that is always in the absence of tarantato proper.
So even in the places where tarantism is reduced and disappears, it remains the tarantella, which slowly generation change of generation orally handed down, and evolves in time function of collective dance or couple, now procession in ritual feasts, now of pace and musical form and poetic serenades brought to dell’innmorata window.