For most English travellers, the Grand Tour ended in the city of Naples, or in the underworlds of Herculanæum and Pompeii. Only those who ventured south-eastwards to Apulia – where the tombs and temples of Magna Grecia could be raided for coins, vases and other relics – were witness to the 'dancing cure' that was a common sight in this remote corner of Italy. Henry Turnbull, whose report was read before the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh in 1771, found that the dance of the tarantella was relied on for various disorders throughout the region: "As there is scarce a disease to which the body is subject, but what they think proceeds from the bite of the tarantula, this method of cure is practised, and with so much success that it seems miraculous, and is esteemed the effect of the music by prejudiced minds."

Such 'miracles' were, of course, the scourge of Enlightenment philosophes. Feigned, forged or pretended, they were to be exposed as superstition and sophistry. Turnbull, not allowing himself to be swayed by the passions of wonder and surprise – emotions that, according to David Hume's An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, sustained the brisk trade in many sham miracles – kept a steady head. Echoing the words of the Archbishop of Otranto, he pronounced the practice "a ridiculous vulgar notion, full of imposture", and noted that there were many 'tarantulisti' who wandered the Kingdoms pretending to have been bitten by a tarantula. Otherwise, the disorder was simply imagined or "occasioned by the heat to which the people are exposed in getting their harvest".

An earlier eyewitness report of the tarantella, published in The Gentleman's Magazine in 1753, had, however, offered a less sceptical account of the tarantella's remedial powers. The Italian bass player Stefano Storace described how he had been unexpectedly called to play the violin for a man who had been found collapsed in the street. Not being familiar with the tarantella, Storace played a number of jigs which all failed to have any effect. Then, as Storace began to follow the aria that an elderly woman sang, "the man began to move to the rhythm of the music, lifting himself to his feet like a thunderbolt, giving the appearance of a man who had awoken from a terrible vision, his gaze fixed and wild, with every joint of his body in motion". When Storace stopped, the man fell to the floor in a convulsive fit; as soon as he resumed, the man was back on his feet and moving with vigour.

Henry Swinburne, who travelled to 'the country of the tarantula' in the 1770s, was one of the first foreign observers to hint at the true nature of the kind of episodes that Storace and Turnbull had described. After commissioning a woman who had been previously bitten "to act the part, and dance the Taranta before me", he concluded that the tarantella was probably a form of pagan bacchanalia, a flight from the toils of agrarian life, that now operated 'under cover' of the spider and devotion to St Paul. Yet, if Swinburne rightly grasped that tarantism was, at root, a cultural artefact more than an illness per se, many questions remained unanswered. Why, when the same species of wolf-spider (Lycosa tarantula) could be found in other regions of Italy, had tarantism assumed such a visible role in public life in Apulia? Why were the physicians, clerics and aristocrats now beginning to abandon the tarantella? And how had St Paul come to occupy such a conspicuous role in the dancing cure?

SPIDER MUSIC

One of the oldest documents on the subject of tarantism, Ferdinando Ponzetti's Sertum Papale De Venensis (1362), had suggested that the victims of shade-dwelling spiders were hostages to the music of the tarantula's bite, to its 'cantum tempore'. Ponzetti's contemporary, William de Marra, scoffed at the ignorant and ill informed who believed that the tarantula actually sang as it bit, but all classes of Apulian society, from peasant to noblewoman, turned to the tarantella. The bite of the tarantula was thought to be potentially fatal. Each summer, moreover, it was liable to re-awaken and the same tarantati would again be called to dance beyond exhaustion.

The symptoms of the tarantula's bite were extremely varied. The most immediate of effects – nausea, headaches, livid complexion and difficulties in speech – might be followed by paroxysms of laughter or tears, sexual excitement, paranoia or a state of mute and listless abjection. These different responses were commonly believed to reflect the different characteristics of the offending spider itself. To purge the venom, musicians attempted to evoke cadences that matched the music of each individual spider. The lively and impassioned Panno rosso, the wistful pastoral of the Panno verde, the slow and staggering Spallata were some of the melodies that were performed. Before the musicians began to play, they would attempt to establish the colour of the spider and the physical location of its bite – clues to its musical character.

A number of objects and aids were employed in the ritual dance. Coloured handkerchiefs or ribbons were commonly worn or held by the tarantati, who were strongly drawn to the colours of the spider that had, purportedly, bitten them. A rope suspended from a tree or ceiling was used to swing upon. A large tub filled with water allowed the tarantati to periodically submerge their heads. Aromatic herbs, such as mint, rue and basil, were inhaled. The behaviour of many tarantati was often highly theatrical and erotic. When not spinning, rolling or stamping to the music, they might proclaim themselves as royalty or great musicians (prompting the family to assume the roles of servant or disciple), request mirrors to groom themselves, or ask for swords with which to fight imaginary enemies. Others elected to be tossed in the air, to dig holes in the ground, or roll in the dirt.

It was because of these dramatic aspects that the tarantella was often mockingly described as Il Carnavaletto delle Donne, the women's little carnival. The psychological benefits of this annually granted licence did, nevertheless, find at least one early champion. Writing in the 1480s, Giovanni Pontano (1429-1507), a leading light of the Academy of Naples, astutely observed that "the people of Apulia are extremely happy, because while other men have no excuses for their follies, the people of Apulia always have a ready one, the tarantula to which they attribute their insane desires."

The tarantati also had recourse to the quacks who peddled their poison antidotes and to priests who were happy to try their hand at canonical style exorcism – sprinkling holy water, donning stole and crucifix, and reciting prayers and litanies from the Rituale Romanum. But these treatments enjoyed little success. Ludovico Valletta's De phalangio Apulo (1706) describes how three priests attempted to cure one young woman whom they believed to be possessed. While the rites were underway, a musician passed by the house. The young woman immediately escaped her exorcists, and fled the house in a mad rage. On reaching the musician, "she fell lifelessly to the ground, as if struck by lightning". The relatives who had followed her asked the musician to play on. "The woman stood up quickly, her strength regained, and began a frenetic dance which lasted two hours without interruption. After having danced for two successive days, she was completely recovered."

For Renaissance and Baroque scholars, the tarantella was a powerful example of the efficacy of musical healing. Athanasius Kircher, perhaps Europe's last true polymath, began to study the musical aspects of tarantism a few years after taking up his post at the Collegio Romano. Kircher's 1641 book, Magnes, sive de arte magnetica (The Magnet, or the Magnetic Arts) and his later Musurgia Universalis (Universal Music Making) drew on abundant material provided by rectors at the colleges of Taranto and Lecce. Kircher argued that the effects of music on the victims of the tarantula were, like the 'charms' and 'virtues' which Greek and Roman physicians had once utilised to treat fevers, gout and melancholy, explicable in terms of the effects of magnetic 'sympathy' which brought the humours into balance.

While Kircher's musicological studies of tarantism stimulated the attention of international scholars (including Robert Boyle, who presented his revised opinions to the Royal Society in 1686), Neapolitan intellectuals, such as Tommaso Cornelio, lambasted Kircher's attempt to marry magic and natural philosophy. All but ignoring the social and psychological functions of the tarantella, tarantism would from now on be approached from a rigidly medical perspective. As far as Cornelio was concerned, the tarantati were melancholic individuals whose mental state led them to "persuade themselves – following popular superstition – that they had been bitten by the tarantula".

Epifanio Ferdinando, a physician from Apulia, had laid the foundations for this clinical interpretation in the 1620s. With the benefit of first-hand observation, Ferdinando was able to present a number of cases which suggested that symptoms reported by the tarantati – who were also commonly described as spezzati (split) schantati (shocked), and rotti (broken) – were just as likely to be suffering the effects of melancholy and delirium. Yet having seen his own cousin die when no musicians could be found to relieve him of the tarantula's bite, Ferdinando was also convinced that the wolf spider deserved its deadly reputation.

Giorgio Baglivi, a 17th-century physician who had spent his early years in Apulia, took a slightly different view. Claiming that there was "a greater frequency of mad people in Apulia than any other region of Italy," Baglivi attributed its surfeit of "ardent fevers, pleurisies, madness and inflammatory diseases" to the unforgiving climate. There were, he contended, two forms of tarantism: one comprising the Carnavaletti delle Donne; the other caused by the virulent poison of the Apulian spider – a poison that caused the humours to coagulate and the spirit to become agitated. Apulia's searing summer heat exaggerated the effects of the poison, causing the victim to dance, thereby returning the humours to a liquid state.

Various trials and experiments had been previously undertaken in order to establish the toxicity of the Apulian tarantula's bite. The Bishop of Polignano had allowed himself to be bitten, yet found himself compelled to dance to relieve his symptoms. A Spanish gentleman from Taranto, confident that there was no musical 'sympathy' between man and spider, contrived to be bitten by two tarantulas of different sizes and colours. The double-dose of poison is said to have proved fatal, no single tune being compatible with the poison he had received.

A public experiment undertaken by the physician Bernardo Clarizio in 1693 indicated that the tarantula's bite was, in fact, far from fatal, but it was not until the 1740s, when Francesco Serao published his Della tarantola, that the medical community began to seriously question the belief. A century on, the interior ministry of the Kingdom of Naples still found it necessary to send every physician in Apulia a circular which announced an inquiry into "whether the Apulian tarantula was or was not poisonous, and if its bite could produce that famous illness called tarantism".

Francesco Serao published his findings in a period in which tarantism was beginning to lose its cultural base. Abandoned by the clerics, doctors and nobility who had once participated in its protracted saturnalia, the tarantella's traditions of musical exorcism were, as one English traveller from the 1820s noted, reserved for the labouring peasantry. At the same time, tarantism was fixed into the religious calendar and increasingly connected with the cult of St Paul.

Throughout the late Middle Ages, Paul had occupied an important role in the popular medicine of central and southern Italy. Claiming descent from the saint, who, according to the Acts of the Apostles, had suffered no ill effects when bitten by a viper in Malta, snake charmers and handlers claimed to cure snake and insect bites with oils and unguents, or with incantations and holy water tempered with terra sigillata (a sun-dried tablet of 'sealed earth'). While these Pauline dynasties went into decline in the 16th and 17th centuries, followers of St Paul in Galatina created a new legend: Paul, after seeking refuge in their hometown, was said to have conferred the power to heal the bite of scorpions, vipers and the tarantula by signing the cross and drinking from the blessed well of his host. This made the town of Galatina effectively immune to the tarantula.

After 1790, the chapel of St Paul in Galatina became a spiritual refuge for the region's tarantati. As more and more poisoned souls came to drink the holy water and converse with their protector, the pagan traditions of musical exorcism went into slow decline. The number of musicians who remained on permanent standby throughout the summer months dwindled, and those that continued to ply their trade rarely had recourse to the repertoire of their predecessors. Francesco Mazzotta, a blind violinist who had acquired a considerable reputation among the tarantati in the 1850s and 1860s, claimed that in towns such as Francavilla and Manduria, where the true tradition of musical healing had been replaced by one standard melody, tarantism was difficult to cure. For this reason, Mazzotta restricted his activities to towns such as Nard—, Squinano and San Pancrazio, where the tarantati were responsive to his variegated melodies. The peasants who could not afford to hire musicians like Mazzotta instead came to attend the annual festival of Ss Peter and Paul.

A MUSICAL EXORCISM

When the religious historian Ernesto De Martino came to Galatina in July of 1959, he was highly critical of the way scholarship had blithely turned tarantism into a 'hysterical malady', a 'strange neurosis', a 'dancing mania' or a 'culture-bound syndrome'. The tendency to "regard our own historical mode of existence as valid for all cultural forms" had, he believed, undermined too many attempts to understand "the existential drama of magic and its characteristic cultural themes". For De Martino, tarantism was a "minor religion" that had been slowly "stripped of its cultural dignityÉ regressing to the level of single morbid episodes which the psychiatrist and not the historian of religious life was called to judge". What De Martino did not know was how widespread this 'eccentric devotion' remained, and whether the vestiges of tarantism in its domestic guise had managed to survive the increasing attention of police and public health officials.

Two days before the festival of Ss Peter and Paul was due to begin, De Martino and his multi-disciplinary team received unexpected news: an exorcism was about to take place on a newly wed woman in Nard—. To justify their presence at this recondite gathering, De Martino's team introduced themselves as doctors from Rome, who were studying this 'strange malady'. The ploy worked. Joining the circle of family and friends that surrounded Maria, the young tarantata, De Martino witnessed a scene that 'brutally catapulted' him to 'another planet'.

A gloomy one-room dwelling had been cleared of its furniture, making space for a four-man band (violin, accordion, guitar, and tambourine) and a small circle of onlookers. A large white sheet marked the ceremonial space upon which the young woman, dressed in a white robe and holding a coloured handkerchief, lay prostrate, smelling of 'unwashed female regions'. Making rhythmic movements with her head, the woman began to crawl along the floor, seemingly propelled by the furious music, her feet beating the floor 50 times every 10 seconds. Even during the standing phases, when the beat slackened and the family circle moved closer to the tarantata, De Martino was struck by the intimate rapport between Maria and the musicians, who appeared to guide her every movement.

When the musicians were too tired to continue, Maria was taken to bed by her family and asked if St Paul had spoken to her yet. No, not yet. On the following morning, Maria began to let out a series of cries – "not dissimilar to the barking of a dog" – which the circle understood as a sign that grace was about to be received. Shortly before three o'clock, Maria signalled to the musicians to stop, moved briskly over to her bed and looked back with a stupefied smile. St Paul had spoken. The musicians played a final tarantella. Maria remained serene and unmoved throughout. As soon as the music finished, the tambourine player fell to his knees and led prayers to St Paul.

Over the course of three weeks, De Martino and his colleagues were able to observe and interview more than 30 of the tarantati who had attended the chapel at Galatina. The vast majority were women who had been 'bitten' during puberty, but in only one case was it possible to establish a definite connection to an actual bite. These crises were mimetic. "[T]he fall to the ground, the sense of exhaustion, anguish, the state of psychomotor agitation with sensory clouding, the difficulty in staying upright, stomach ache, nausea and vomiting, paræsthesias and muscular achesÉ this all amounted to a representation of poisoning that could easily fool the lay person".

The cathartic function of tarantism was clear to see. Maria di Nardó, for example, had lost her father at 13 and been raised by her aunt and uncle. She was first 'bitten' at 18, when, because of her poor social standing, the family of her fiancó oppos opposed marriage. Now, finding herself in a loveless marriage, she remained a bride of St Paul, taking mystic succour from her yearly abandonment. All the life stories that De Martino collected suggested that tarantism had provided a liminal zone into which secret desires, frustrated hopes and unresolved grief could be channelled. The pretext of the tarantella was never the real story. The spider, the bite and St Paul were, for De Martino, symbols in a psychic drama that could be paralleled with many 'ecstatic religions' and 'possession rituals', including those of Haitian vodun, Ethiopian zar cults and the Sudanese bori brotherhoods.

While De Martino went on to acknowledge further correspondences between tarantism and the ancient bacchanalias, and with the mænads in particular, he resisted the notion that it was in any sense a relic of Apulia's ancient past. Tarantism, as a form of musical exorcism, had properly emerged in the mediæval period. Its transformation into an illness was not, as the medical historian Henry Sigerist had suggested, a way of camouflaging it from clerical interrogators. The real inquisition that tarantism had to face was headed by Enlightenment intellectuals, such as Tommaso Cornelio, who cast it into a twisted web of folklore and superstition.