Skip to content
Atlas NoctisA nocturnal atlas of folklore
A — documented

Tarantate

Apulia · Basilicata · The Mezzogiorno
Salento, provinces of Lecce, Brindisi and Taranto; the ritual centre is the chapel of San Paolo at Galatina

Tarantate — it struck predominantly young unmarried women, with summer crises coinciding with the harvest: prostration, catatonia, delirium, pains.

A tarantata dances on the white sheet among the coloured ribbons while the musicians try out the melodies on the tambourine, in a house in Salento.
Variants and dialect names
Tarantismo, tarantolismo; le tarantate. The taranta is distinguished as libertine, sad and mute, or tempestuous, each with its own melody
What is told
It struck predominantly young unmarried women, with summer crises coinciding with the harvest: prostration, catatonia, delirium, pains. The domestic rite had four moments — musical diagnosis on the white sheet, the chromatic phase with the ribbons, frenzied dance in cycles of fifteen minutes for up to three days, and the pilgrimage to Galatina on 29 June.
What it was forthe author’s reading
A cultural institution for giving form, name and public outlet to a female suffering otherwise unsayable in a rigidly codified peasant society.
Where it is attested
It is the best documented entry in the atlas. Ernesto de Martino, La terra del rimorso, 1961, the outcome of the interdisciplinary expedition of 1959 in Salento, with ethnographers, physicians and psychiatrists.
Caution
Today's concert pizzica descends from the rite but does not continue it: they are two distinct phenomena and are to be kept separate.

The grade says how well the entry is documented, not how interesting it is. How the grades are assigned.

In the same area

BJanaraCampania — Benevento and the valleys of the Sabato and the Calore; Sannio and IrpiniaBMunacielloCampania — Naples and the Vesuvian areaBMonachicchioBasilicata, Calabria — Inland Basilicata and northern Calabria; strong attestation from Aliano (province of Matera)BScazzamurieddhuApulia — The whole of Puglia, with its epicentre in the Ionian-Salentine areaAI vattienti di Nocera TerineseCalabria — Nocera Terinese (province of Catanzaro), Tyrrhenian Calabria; related flagellation rites are attested elsewhere in the region, for example at Verbicaro (province of Cosenza)

Related by theme

Entries that share the motif, the phenomenon behind it or the history of their collection — not the geography.

AGl’ Cierv, il Cervo di CastelnuovoMolise — Castelnuovo al Volturno, a hamlet of Rocchetta a Volturno (province of Isernia), at the foot of the MainardeAPishtacoPeru — Peruvian Andes, with documentary epicentre at Huamanga, Ayacucho; parallel forms on the Bolivian altiplano

← Back to the atlas of Italy