In this video, J. Anthony Allen narrates the origins and cultural background of the tarantella, an Italian folk rhythm and dance linked to a 16th‑century belief that tarantula bites caused a dancing mania. He explains the legend of people in Taranto supposedly dancing themselves to death after spider bites, and how a specific melody and rhythm—later called the tarantella—was used as a therapeutic cure. Allen distinguishes between the traditional folk tarantella, typically performed with mandolin, drums, accordion, tambourine, flute, fiddle or clarinet, and later classical compositions that borrow the tarantella rhythm. He notes that modern science disproves the literal dancing‑to‑death claim, but the folk dance persists across Italy today.
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Maybe you've heard this melody before. This melody is quite interesting. And it's not just this particular melody. It's actually this rhythm and a style of dance. It goes all the way back to the 1500s in Italy. And what happened was there was an area of Italy called Taranto, and there's a particular kind of spider in this area that is named after the area. And we therefore call it the tarantula. The tarantula. So, of course, no good Halloween story would be complete without a story about tarantulas and spiders. So this, it was believed at the time. This is 500 years ago, it was believed that a bite from this spider would lead to a certain kind of dancing madness. And I've read different reports about this, about people dancing essentially themselves to death, just moving and moving and moving and moving and going and going, and not being able to stop their body from moving. Now, there are some more probably accurate stories about just people just dancing. And. And maybe this comes from, like, a real physiology of, like, trying to move the poison in your system around. I don't know. It's not the recommended cure for a tarantula bite, let me just say that. But this idea that the venom of the tarantula would put entire groups of people into this dancing mania overtook this town and other towns in the area. I've read stories about people being. About large groups of people being infected with this and large, entire villages in Italy essentially dancing themselves to near death. So how does music play in. A melody was found, a rhythm was found that when played for these people, would help them settle down. It was basically orchestrating this crazy dance that they were doing as the spider venom went through them, supposedly. So we call that music the tarantella, the dance of the tarantula. Now, if you look around, you can find a lot of different tarantellas. There are actually tarantellas as a style of music. There are pieces of music written called the tarantella, written by composers you've heard of, but those are typically not the traditional Italian folk song of the tarantella, which is more like what we just heard at the beginning of this video. Tarantellas are usually played on mandolin with some drums, maybe accordion, tambourines, flute, sometimes fiddle, maybe clarinet. Much more of a folk dance thing than a classical music piece. However, like I said, there are a lot of classical music pieces that use the idea and the rhythm of the tarantella. And while we know today that the bite of a tarantula doesn't actually make you feverishly dance for literally days on end until you pass out of exhaustion. We don't know why these big groups of people broke out into this dance and why this mania happened back then. But we do know the cure was a musical form and a rhythm called the tarantella. And now you can find the tarantella performed around Italy as its own folk dance. Here's a little bit of what it looks like, Sam.
