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.