Taranto, Italy and the Dance of the Spider

Taranto 

You've heard of the dance, the Tarantella? Its origins are an oddity, and  it is linked to Taranto, a small city in Puglia, on Italy's Ionian coast. It's an odd distinction for a town, but that is its fate and fame. Another nearby city in Puglia, Galatina, with similar links to the tarantella -- plus some incredible art worth seeing--  is featured in a separate column here.  

Title still-shot of documentary, credits and link

The Origins of the Tarantella 

The peculiarity of the tarantella is that its origins are associated with a psychic disorder, a form of hysteria, known as tarantism that was recognized in Italy as early as the 15th C.  Tarantism has lingered on in isolated rural areas through the 20th C. This has been recorded n a documentary clip from nearby Galatina the 1950's and aired on TV by another off-beat traveller, Anthony Bourdin. You can click here to see the original Italian documentary, La Taranta, which filmed incidents of tarantism occurring in the nearby countryside. Filmed in the 1950's, it looks much earlier in time and is quite different in its rawness from the holiday tarantellas celebrated in festivals now. 

Spider Bite or Hysteria? 

Said to be caused by the bite of a tarantula spider (a form of wolf-spider or black-widow), its victims  (mostly women) display distressed and feverish symptoms that include vomiting and sweating, fear and delirium, depression and paranoia. They are seemingly cured by a rite that involves feverish 'dancing' that can last for days. It's not so much dancing as it is impulsive, pulsing movement: jumping, hopping, gyrating upright or on the floor. The frenetic movements are accompanied by music played fast, in 6/8 time, with the pace of both music and movements reciprocally urging each other onward, all in  the company of  family and neighbors who attend the seized woman. The often delirious victim, with attendant crowd, eventually is guided to the local church where, still trance-like and tired-out, she is finally 'danced-out 'of her throes with religious help. 

A Fascinating History of a Malady and a Dance 

The tarantella has a fascinating history. It is thought that the town of Taranto, in particular, gave its name to the dance because a particular variety spider, popularly believed to be venomous, was common to this region.So, the dance was  named the tarantula.

Dancing Maenad on Vase by Python, 330 B.C. credits

The origins of the dance, however, may lie much deeper in history and cult. This dance is  speculated to be a surviving remnant from ancient rites of Diana or of Dionysius. 

We know that all of Puglia was originally more Greek than Latin/Roman. By early Roman times, Bacchanalian rites were suppressed, which may have driven them underground ... where they lingered and were transformed into another collective ritual in the cult of Tarantism. What is known for certain is that Tarantism dates back centuries in this region, appearing in early manuscripts. 

The music, originally played on  local  instruments  available  at the time (tambourine, drums, fiddle, accordion, guitar)  developed into folk dance forms. These dances became popular in several regions of southern Italy. In the Salento region, the dance is  also known as the pizzica. 

The tarantella also made its way to the more formal dance-floor for nimble-footed partners. And the stellar choreographer, George Balanchine, adapted it to ballet. Remarkable in its journey from dirt floors to concert halls, the tarantella also appears in the work of such dignified composers as Franz Liszt and Frederic Chopin. But the original  forms of the dance, very obscurely caused by a spider's bite, were inspired by each individual's almost hypnotically frenzied, trance-like movements in response to the dancer's delirium, then set to music's beat.

Archaeology in Taranto: the MARTA

We visited Taranto, the city etymologically linked to this curious dance, We were unlikely to see the tarentella danced today. Our motivation for visiting was to see Taranto's well-recommended archaeological museum, the MARTA. 

 a navigation scene with figure carved on cup, 2,000 BC

We were not disappointed. The MARTA  (Museo Nazionale Archeologico di Taranto) is  easy to navigate and fun to explore, with excellent staff to help, if needed. The access and lighting are modern, and the items just enough to give a sense of the particularity of each item and its context. The displays are very well presented (many in English and Italian), with computer-screens that let you look further into particular items and context. 

This is a museum you can appreciate, one that takes both its informative function and audience satisfaction into consideration. We left, feeling both intellectually and aesthetically satisfied. And maybe we even learned a thing or two. Especially notable is how much the language, artifacts, art, and customs derived from ancient Greece (magna-Graecia) and cross-cultural interactions influenced this southern region that is now Italy.

One of the reasons I love museums like MARTA, which focus upon what we call "prehistory" and "protohistory", is that they show as well as inspire a special blend of skillfully investigative research +

imagination in order to unearth, literally, what the displayed objects likely meant when they were fully alive. 

The museum is arranged chronologically as you walk through its levels. Here are some of the many intriguing and beautiful objects in the museum -- a random and non-chronological sampling from photos I took. They include 20,000 year-old figurines of a female/goddess, a polychromed head with its colours intact, anthropomorphic pots from the 6th century B.C., one of the most intricate gold earrings I've seen (4th century B.C.),  a nutcracker in the shape of black hands, representations of African faces ( 3rd-4th century B.C. cross-roads of many cultures), wonderfully designed functional pots from different epochs, and Medusa as she looked across ancient time.

 

Communication and Cross-Cultural Influences

It's a gift to us that a focus of  such museums is to illuminate the earliest forms communication within this region of multiple cultures. We come to appreciate the intents and meanings behind the many quotidian, functional, ceremonial, religious and just plain beautiful objects displayed. 

Given that there are no extant traces of the language that accompanied many of the objects  shown, we're left with marvellous clues to decipher: technological artifacts of the time, items relating to food production/consumption, houses and settlements, burial remains, ritual or ceremonial objects, human adornments, decorative motifs and representations (animal, human, gods), aesthetic styles, art. 

Almost any human act can have both functional and symbolic or ideological meaning, and meanings can change across generations and different communities. In this way, archaeology s remains a living story precisely because it remains open to be deciphered, by us  now... as it was then. 

Quite a time-travel adventure when we visited Taranto!

More Creative Life News

You can read and see more about Italy, plus other travels and creative adventures by this itinerant artist at Creative Life News click  https://www.janetstrayer.com

Regards, Janet