THE PHENOMENON OF "NEO-TARANTISM"

© Saba Laudanna

It is almost forty years since the ethnologist Ernesto de Martino went with his expert team to the Salento (the region around the city of Lecce) to investigate the archaic incidences of trance, that later became known as Tarantism and that survived in that area, as well as in other regions of South Italy.

In the 1970s a general revival in folk culture took place that included an extensive rediscovering of traditional music. In those days political reasons were the main driver as folk music became a clear way of expressing a counter-culture or a culture of the oppressed.