Folklore

Traditional Tarantella dance of poisonous spider is a main part of Salento Folklore: its bite (“Pizzica”) generates an hallucinogenic psychic agitation and also muscular spasms, so “Pizzica” bites become real epileptic crisis. So, this kind of dance has a therapeutic but also estatic origin: this “Pizzica” does not mean a real spider bite, but it represents economic, social, sexual yoke symbol, that poses under itself the excluded people. Certainly, woman has always represented this excluded symbol pre-eminently in the Human history. Her ancestral strength and primordial power generated male fear and the consequent social women isolation. This tarantella dance proposes that female frustration, in which spider bites arrived with torments and ecstasy till San Paolo grace (women protector): he arrived to free them. Dance rite took place in a wide sheet (with a little head in the corner of offering harvesting). That is to say a pagan custom, that comes from Taranta and from earth mother (fertility is the incontinent female power symbol). Christianity connects it to Saint Church Mother.
We can find news about Puglia tarantella till Middle-Ages and then it disappears at the beginning of 1.800.
It reminds us primordial music and ancestral memories, because it has always been accompanied by Lecce tambourine , which gives us the idea of a basic rhythm with percussion and an elegant confusion with its bells.
We can state that today tarantella has been revalued and not only in Salento area: we can find it on festival and long dedicated nights: that is to say an unique representation, able to enchant, to clam, but also a frenetic, involving unrestrainable vortex with its own rhythm: in this kind of show, the visitor cannot begin the victim.