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There are cities that can be understood through their monuments. Napoli is not one of them. To understand Napoli, you have to listen. You have to listen to the bells ringing above the streets, to the voices echoing through the vicoli, to the fishermen returning from the sea, to the vendors shouting their wares, to the music coming from a window that you cannot quite locate. And, sooner or later, you have to listen to the tambourine.
Because Napoli does not merely have a history written in stone. It has a history written in rhythm. And few rhythms are more immediately associated with southern Italy than the tarantella.
After walking through the history of Napoli -from the Greek foundations of Neapolis to Roman Pompeii and Herculaneum, from the medieval world of Castel dell'Ovo to the splendour of Castel Nuovo and the kingdoms that ruled from this extraordinary Mediterranean city- I wanted to take a different path. This time, I wanted to leave the castles behind. I wanted to follow the music. Because castles preserve the memory of kings. Songs and dances preserve the memory of people.
The first thing to say about the tarantella is that there is not, strictly speaking, a single tarantella. It is a family of traditional dances that developed in different forms throughout southern Italy. Its rhythms, gestures, instruments and meanings vary considerably from one region to another.
The traditional tarantella is generally characterised by a fast, energetic rhythm, often in 3/8 or 6/8, accompanied by instruments such as the tambourine, guitar and, later, mandolin and accordion.
The dance became particularly associated with Napoli and the culture of southern Italy, but its history cannot be reduced to a single place or a single explanation. Even the name is surrounded by uncertainty. For centuries, tarantella was connected to taranta and tarantola, and popular tradition associated the dance with the bite of a spider. The traditional explanation was wonderfully dramatic: the bite of the tarantula produced a mysterious condition that could be cured by music and dance.
The victim -traditionally, and very often, a woman- would enter a state of agitation or apparent trance. Musicians would play different melodies until they found the particular rhythm that made the tarantata respond. And then she would dance. Faster. And faster. Until, according to the traditional belief, the illness had been expelled from the body.
The historical phenomenon known as tarantism is particularly associated with Apulia and the Salento, where it survived in attenuated forms well into the twentieth century. The oldest known documentary connection between the bite of the taranta and the therapeutic power of music dates back to the fourteenth century.
Today, of course, we do not understand tarantism as a medical treatment for spider venom. But perhaps that is not the most interesting part of the story. What fascinates me is something much more human. For centuries, people believed that music could heal. They believed that rhythm could speak to the body when words were no longer enough. And that idea feels profoundly Mediterranean to me.
The story of the tarantula has become so deeply embedded in the popular imagination that it is tempting to tell the tarantella as a simple story: Spider. Poison. Madness. Music. Dance. Cure. But history is rarely so simple. Modern scholarship has shown that tarantism was a complex cultural phenomenon involving ritual, belief, community, music, the body and psychological distress. Ernesto de Martino's famous twentieth-century study of the phenomenon helped establish tarantism as a major subject of anthropological and religious-historical research.
And there is another important distinction. Tarantism and tarantella are related in the cultural imagination, but they are not interchangeable terms. The tarantella became a dance in its own right, and its history continued far beyond the ritual world of the tarantate. This is where Napoli enters the story.
The tarantella became increasingly associated with Napoli and the Neapolitan imagination. By the eighteenth century, travellers were already describing the dance in Napoli. Goethe himself encountered the tarantella during his Italian journey in 1786-1787. Later, during the nineteenth century, the dance increasingly acquired the form that would become familiar throughout Europe: a lively, theatrical and often flirtatious dance between two people. And something fascinating happened. The dance travelled. It moved from the countryside to the city. From popular culture to the theatre. From local celebrations to fashionable society. And eventually from Napoli to the rest of Europe. The tarantella became an image of southern Italy itself. Suddenly, the whole of Napoli seemed to dance. From the kingdom to the street This transformation is particularly interesting when we remember the history of Napoli. For centuries, this was not merely a city. It was a capital. A city of kings, dynasties and competing powers. The Angevins, the Aragonese, the Spanish and the Bourbons all left their mark on its architecture and political history.
Castel Nuovo tells us about that Napoli. Its towers, its triumphal arch, its coats of arms and its monumental architecture speak of power. But the tarantella tells us about another Napoli. The Napoli of fishermen. Of craftsmen. Of market sellers. Of women gathering in courtyards. Of religious festivals. Of young people flirting. Of families celebrating. Of people who did not leave behind chronicles, palaces or monumental inscriptions. They left behind music. And this is perhaps why I find the tarantella such a perfect continuation of my journey through Napoli.
Castel Nuovo tells us about the Napoli of kings. The tarantella tells us about the Napoli of its people. And when we speak about Campania, there is another word that deserves to be heard: tammurriata.
The tammurriata is a traditional sung dance from Campania, particularly widespread around the Vesuvian and Salernitan areas. Its name comes from the tammurro, the large frame drum whose powerful rhythm dominates the performance. The tammorra is not simply an accompanying instrument. It is almost another voice. The hands strike the drum in different ways, producing different tones, while castanets, putipù, triccheballacche and other instruments can join the performance. The songs may speak of love, sexuality, everyday life and work. And here the distinction becomes important again.
The tammurriata belongs to the broader world of Campanian traditional music and dance. It is related to the southern Italian tradition that we associate with the tarantella, but it has its own rhythms, instruments, contexts and traditions. There is no single southern Italian dance. There is a whole Mediterranean vocabulary of movement. And perhaps that is more beautiful.
There is another reason why I find the Campanian dances so fascinating. They exist in a world where the boundary between the sacred and the profane is wonderfully blurred. I wrote recently about Napoli and its peculiar relationship with religion: the saints, the processions, the churches, the devotion, the superstition, the celebrations and the extraordinary emotional relationship that Neapolitans have with death.
The tammurriata fits perfectly into that world. A religious celebration can become a celebration of the body. A procession can become music. Music can become dance. Dance can become courtship. And courtship can become celebration. Nothing has to remain in its assigned category.
This is Napoli. A city where contradiction is not necessarily a problem. It is often a way of life. The body remembers There is something else that fascinates me about traditional dance. It survives differently from architecture. A castle can stand for six hundred years. A temple can survive earthquakes, wars, eruptions and changing political regimes. We can photograph it. Measure it. Restore it. Study it. But a dance is much more fragile. If nobody dances it, it disappears. There is no stone to preserve it. No wall to protect it. No archaeological excavation capable of bringing it back exactly as it was. It survives only if one generation teaches another generation how to move. And this makes popular culture extraordinarily powerful. The body becomes an archive. The hands remember what the books forgot. The rhythm remembers what the stones cannot tell us. A grandmother teaches a granddaughter. A musician teaches a child. A community gathers for a festival. The drum begins. And suddenly, something centuries old is alive again.
Perhaps this is why the tarantella feels so profoundly Mediterranean to me. Not because every Mediterranean culture dances the same way. Quite the opposite. The Mediterranean has always been a place of extraordinary diversity. Greek, Roman, Arab, Byzantine, Norman, Occitan, French, Catalan, Jewish and countless local traditions have crossed its waters. Languages changed. Religions changed. Kingdoms rose and disappeared. Borders moved. Cities were destroyed and rebuilt. But people continued to meet around food, music, work, religion, love and the sea. Culture travelled by ship. And sometimes it travelled inside the body. A rhythm could cross a port. A melody could be carried by a sailor. A dance could be transformed by the next village. A word could acquire a new meaning in another dialect. This is what the Mediterranean has always done. It connects things.
Perhaps that is the secret of Napoli. It is an ancient city, but it has never been still. Greek Neapolis became Roman Neapolis. Roman Napoli became a medieval city. The medieval city became the capital of kingdoms. The kingdoms became part of larger states. The old port became a modern metropolis. The fishermen of yesterday became fewer. The streets changed. The buildings changed. The people changed. And yet Napoli remained unmistakably Napoli. Because a city is not only its architecture. It is what its people do with the architecture. They walk through it. They shout across it. They fall in love in it. They mourn in it. They celebrate in it. They eat in it. They sing in it. And sometimes, they dance.
I imagine a Neapolitan evening. The heat of the day is finally disappearing. The stone streets are beginning to cool. Somewhere, someone picks up a tammorra. One person begins to play. Another begins to sing. Someone starts clapping. And then a woman begins to dance. Perhaps she is not thinking about Greek antiquity. Perhaps she is not thinking about the Kingdom of Napoli. Perhaps she has never read about tarantism or the history of the tarantella. She simply knows the rhythm. Her body knows what to do. And that is enough. Because culture does not always survive through knowledge. Sometimes it survives through memory. And memory does not always live in books. Sometimes it lives in the hands. In the feet. In the voice. In the rhythm.
I have spent so much time during this journey looking at stones. The columns of Paestum. The streets of Pompeii. The houses of Herculaneum. The churches of Napoli. Castel dell'Ovo. Castel Nuovo. They have all told me something about the people who built them. But now I want to listen to the people who came afterwards. Because the history of Napoli did not end when its kings disappeared. It did not end when its kingdoms changed. It did not end when its walls became monuments. It continued in kitchens, workshops, harbours, churches, squares and family celebrations. It continued in songs. And it continued in dance.
Castles preserve the memory of kingdoms. Songs and dances preserve the memory of people. Perhaps that is why the tarantella is so important. It reminds us that history is not only what survives in stone. Sometimes history is what survives in us.
There is something wonderfully rebellious about that. You can conquer a city. You can change its rulers. You can redraw its borders. You can build new palaces over old foundations. You can change its language. You can change its name. But if its people continue to sing, something remains. If they continue to gather, something remains. If they continue to dance, something remains. And so, after walking through the Napoli of emperors, kings, saints, fishermen and sailors, I arrive at another Napoli. A Napoli without a throne. Without an army. Without a crown. Just a drum, a song and a human body moving to a rhythm that has travelled across centuries. Perhaps this is the most democratic monument of all. No marble. No bronze. No fortress. Just people. Keeping something alive.
And somewhere in the streets of Napoli, the tammorra begins again. The hands strike the drum. The rhythm accelerates. Someone laughs. Someone starts singing. And Napoli dances. Because some cities preserve their history in monuments. Napoli preserves part of hers in movement.
Perhaps that is what the tammurriata has always been: not simply a dance, but a people remembering who they are.
More information: L'Italo-Americano
la tarantella è stata tipica della città di Napoli,
dove per il passato essa aveva la funzione
che oggi ha in provincia la tammurriata.
As a couple dance,
the Tarantella has been typical of the city of Naples,
where in the past it had the function
that today the Tammurriata has in the province.
