The Night of Taranta is a popular music festival that aims to enhance the traditional music of Salento through its revival and contamination with other musical languages. It takes place in August, in an itinerant form in various squares of Salento, starting from Corigliano d’Otranto and culminating in the concert of Melpignano, which sees the participation of musicians of national and international fame.
Since 1998, La Notte della Taranta has made possible the valorization and diffusion in the world of the music and dance of Salento: the pizzica.
An annual summer event, it attracts thousands of people from all over the world to Malpignano, a small town in the Salento area. A real ritual where the ancestral strength of the tambourine transforms the night of music into a large dancing and free community.
The “pizzica” is a dance belonging to the family of the “tarantelle” used in the past as a cure for the “tarantate”, disadvantaged women who, according to popular belief, were pinched by the poisonous spider. A small orchestra and the dance of the pizzica with the intercession of St. Paul and other saints, again according to popular belief, led to healing. The socio-anthropological phenomenon of tarantism is well described by Ernesto De Martino in his “La terra del rimorso” (The land of remorse).
Today the people of the Taranta no longer believe in the legendary bite of the tarantula, but the spider has become the symbol that creates a new and contemporary ritual around the zoomorphic deity: the Taranta. There is no longer exorcism but adoration around the God who dances. Whoever comes to Melpignano or dances the pizzica anywhere in the world no longer needs to be attacked by an external element in order to share the ritual. There is no tarantism device in our time but La Notte della Taranta has been the trigger for a new way of conceiving dance and music in Salento and the Concertone is the lighting of the votive fire of this modern gathering that ends every year at the first light of dawn.
