On summer nights across Puglia, the rapid beat of the tamburello gathers a crowd around a dancing couple. They circle without touching, advancing and retreating through glances and gestures, with the women guiding the courtship. Known as pizzica pizzica, the dance now animates festivals, weddings and social media, adding to Puglia’s appeal as a vacation destination. Yet beneath its festive surface lies a more complex history.

Although it shares rhythms and gestures with pizzica tarantata, the two historically served different purposes. One was a social dance; the other belonged to tarantism, a healing ritual centered on the supposed bite of a mythical spider.

That ritual and its reinvention are the subjects of the newly released Tarantismo: Odyssey of an Italian Ritual, a bilingual book accompanied by a double vinyl album. At its launch at NYU’s Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, co-author Alan Marzo-Strani traced tarantism from the impoverished countryside of Salento to its modern revival.

To reconstruct that trajectory, the book draws on interviews and contributions from artists, researchers and people connected to tarantism. A crucial point of departure is Ernesto de Martino’s La terra del rimorso, based on fieldwork conducted in Salento in 1959, when the ritual still retained a shared belief in its healing power, before modernization and institutional medicine pushed it toward disappearance

At its core was the belief that women experiencing physical or psychological distress had been bitten by a taranta, a mythical spider. Musicians, typically playing tamburello, violin, accordion and guitar, repeated insistent rhythms while the ‘tarantata’ danced for hours, seeking to expel its poison.

The bite was not always understood literally. Tarantism gave a public form to depression, grief, abuse, and desires that women in a patriarchal society could rarely express. Over time, the ritual absorbed Catholic elements: Saint Paul became its healing protector, and the ‘tarantate’ sought his intercession at a chapel in Galatina, near Lecce.

Marzo-Strani explained that pizzica reemerged during the 1990s, as a new generation of Salentines rediscovered local traditions. At the same time, La Notte della Taranta, founded in 1998, brought pizzica to a mass audience and became an important showcase for Salento and Puglia. That evolution is echoed in the double vinyl accompanying the book. It pairs 1950s field recordings with contemporary electronic interpretations.

Joining Marzo-Strani was Alessandra Belloni, one of the leading interpreters and teachers of Southern Italian ritual music and dance. Founder and Artistic Director of I Giullari di Piazza, a New York ensemble that performs Italian folk music, theater and dance, Belloni has studied these traditions for four decades, placing their therapeutic potential at the center of her work. In her Rhythm Is the Cure workshops, Belloni uses drumming and trance-inspired movement to encourage physical and emotional release among women facing various challenges, including infertility and sexual-abuse trauma.

The pizzica captivating visitors today may seem far removed from its ritual past. Yet beneath its celebratory surface, the beat of the tamburello still carries a legacy of women’s resilience and collective healing.