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Italian & Irish Music

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The International Folk Music  Festival​

The Pizzica dance dates back hundreds, if not thousands of years. Shrouded in myth and legend, the dance was thought to have been the only cure for a tarantula bite. Or, metaphorically, for someone possessed by the devil...

When the alarm went that someone had been bitten, usually while working in the fields, the local band would pick up their instruments. These would traditionally be violins, mandolins, guitar, flute, accordion and large tambourines. They would rush to the house of the afflicted.

Once arrived, they would begin to play, slowly at first, while the patient, usually in a high fever by this time, began the dance. As the music got faster, so too did the steps of the dancer, whose aim was to expel the poison (or malignant spirit) through sheer force of motion and perspiration. 

 

In the 1990s, the music and dance of the pizzica was rediscovered by the part of the new generations, and despite the lack of local pizzica models, there was a rejection of the ball that stimulated especially female protagonists, and from the performances of ballerinas on the stage to accompany musical groups, the phenomenon spread among young people thanks to a myriad of popular dance schools. The phenomenon of valorization, reinvention and creative mutation of neopizzica is linked to analogous phenomena of reproposition of other genres of music (tarantelle calabresi, tarantella del Gargano, balli sul tamburo campani, saltarelli dell'Italia centrale, etc.), encouraging that phenomenon of the so-called "ballo folk".

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In the last years many musical events have been organized, including "La Notte della Taranta"

which calls out thousands of enthusiasts

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daniele.napoleoni@libero.it

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