tarantola

The tarantula takes its name from Taranto, a port city in Puglia, southern Italy. In the Middle Ages, Taranto and its surrounding countryside were home to the European wolf spider, whose bite was (incorrectly) believed to cause a condition called tarantism: a hysterical state curable only by frenzied, prolonged dancing. The dance was the tarantella. The spider was the tarantola. The disease was tarantism. An entire medical and cultural complex grew from a single spider in a single Italian city.

Tarantism appears in medical texts from the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries. Physicians described patients — mostly women — who after being bitten (or claiming to have been bitten) danced for hours or days, sometimes requiring musicians to play continuously. The condition peaked in the 1600s. Modern historians believe tarantism was a socially sanctioned outlet for psychological distress in a society that offered women few other forms of expression. The spider bite was the excuse. The dancing was the treatment. The word tarantula was the diagnosis.

When Spanish explorers encountered large, hairy spiders in the Americas, they called them tarántulas by analogy with the Italian spider — despite the two animals belonging to different families entirely. The American tarantula (family Theraphosidae) is large, hairy, and relatively harmless to humans. The Italian tarantola (a wolf spider, family Lycosidae) is small, fast, and its bite, while painful, does not cause dancing. The name transferred from a small European spider to a large American one because both were frightening.

The tarantella survived the debunking of tarantism. It is still danced at weddings and festivals in southern Italy, its tempo increasing until dancers cannot keep up. The medical justification vanished centuries ago. The music, the movement, and the word remain.