Along Came a Spider


Dancing in Southern Italy has a whole lot to do with spiders; tarantulas, actually. Tarantulas! Apparently at one point in the history of southern Italy, tarantulas bit enough women, causing them to become almost demonically possessed, that several types of tarantula-trace dances developed in response. The iconic Italian dance known as the Tarantella, developed from ancient Italian rituals such as the tarnatolati and became less frantic over time. Today there are many kinds of tarantellas, such as the pizzica tarantella, a tarantella that originated in the southeastern city Salento, and the joyous tammuriata of Campania, which we see in this video.