In 1975, a novelist from a small town in the heel of Italy’s boot looked at what was happening to the music around her and decided it was dying too fast to watch.
Rina Durante was not a musician. She was a writer, a journalist, a teacher. Born Caterina Durante in 1928 in Melendugno, province of Lecce, she had published a prize-winning novel (La Malapianta, Rizzoli, 1964, awarded the Premio Salento). She knew the villages. She knew the songs. And she could see that the generation who still remembered the old pizzica, the trance music that had once served as medicine for the possessed, was getting old. Their children wanted what they saw on television. At early concerts, locals threw stones at the performers because they wanted pop, not peasant music.
Rina assembled the musicians anyway. She recruited her cousin Daniele Durante as guitarist and bandleader, alongside vocalists Roberto Licci and Rossella Pinto, ethnomusicologist Luigi Chiriatti, and percussionist Bucci Caldarulo. She named the group Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino, “Songbook of Greek Salento,” a name that was itself a declaration: this music belonged to the Grecìa Salentina, the cluster of villages where an ancient Greek dialect called Griko was still spoken, and that heritage was worth preserving.
Their first international concert came in 1976 at Athens’ Panathinaikos stadium, performing before 60,000 people. According to Rossella Pinto, after their set, the audience followed them for autographs instead of staying for the Chilean band that played next. The first album, Canti di Terra d’Otranto e della Grecia Salentina, appeared in 1977 on Fonit Cetra, chosen over RCA for political reasons: the band’s orientation was left-wing, rooted in the broader Italian movement to preserve working-class music.
Fifty years, twenty-two albums, and a Songlines Music Award later, that group is still performing. But the album that cracked the code between tradition and modernity, between village ritual and world stage, came in 2012. It is called Pizzica Indiavolata, and it is one of the most alive recordings of the twenty-first century.
The Spider’s Medicine
To understand the album, you need to understand what pizzica actually was before it became a festival attraction.
For a detailed history, see our companion essay Tarantism: The Dance of Desire and Delirium. But here is the short version.
Pizzica tarantata was a healing ritual. Someone in crisis, the tarantata, was said to have been bitten by the taranta, a mythical spider whose venom could only be purged through music and dance. Musicians would arrive at the afflicted person’s home and begin to play. The first task was diagnostic: they had to discover which melody, which rhythm, which colored ribbon would make the tarantata respond. When the right combination was found, the patient began to move. The musicians escalated the tempo over hours, sometimes days. The tarantata danced to exhaustion, writhing on the ground, spinning, climbing furniture. The ritual continued until the body gave out and the “poison” was considered expelled.
Was the venom physiological or psychological? Ernesto de Martino, the anthropologist who led the definitive 1959 research expedition to Salento, argued it was neither, or both. He called tarantism a “mythic-ritual horizon” for the discharge of deep unconscious conflicts: impossible loves, grinding poverty, sexual frustration in a rigidly patriarchal society. The bite of the taranta gave women (most tarantate were women) permission to collapse, to scream, to move their bodies in ways that daily life forbade. The community provided the cure through collective attention, rhythm, and time.
The instruments were specific. The tamburello, a frame drum with goatskin head and metal jingles, provided the pulse. The violin carried the melody, probing for the emotional frequency that would unlock the tarantata’s response. The organetto (diatonic accordion) sustained harmonic drones. Voices wove call-and-response patterns, sometimes addressing the patient directly, sometimes invoking Saint Paul. The music functioned in a fast 6/8 meter, a rocking triplet push-pull that makes stillness physically difficult. Minor keys shifted to major. Dark gave way to light. The arc was therapeutic: build, release, quiet, build again.
By the 1960s, modernization had gutted the tradition. The last documented authentic tarantism cases date to that decade. The music that had served as medicine for centuries was becoming a curiosity, then a memory.
This is what Rina Durante was trying to save.
The Durante Dynasty
The first era of CGS, roughly 1975 to 2007, was archival. Daniele Durante led the band through dozens of recordings that captured traditional repertoire with documentary fidelity. The sound was raw, the intent scholarly. Albums like Canti di Terra d’Otranto e della Grecia Salentina (1977) and Ni Pizzicau Lu Core (1997) served as field recordings dressed in concert form. They preserved what existed. They did not reinvent it.
Then in 2007, Daniele stepped back and his son Mauro Durante took over. Mauro was about twenty-two years old.
He had joined the band at fourteen, already playing violin, voice, and tamburello. He studied folk music, violin, and frame drums at a musical conservatory and learned frame drum technique from masters including Arnaldo Vacca, Zohar Fresco, and Alfio Antico. By the time he assumed leadership, he had already caught the attention of Ludovico Einaudi, who featured him as violinist on the album Nightbook (2009, Ponderosa/Decca) and brought him on international tours as violinist and percussionist, including London’s Royal Albert Hall. In 2010 and 2011, Mauro served as musical assistant to Einaudi at La Notte della Taranta, the massive annual festival in Melpignano. In 2012, he did the same for Goran Bregovic.
The connections Mauro built through Einaudi and La Notte della Taranta gave him a vision that Daniele’s generation, for all its dedication, could not have had. He understood that the tradition did not need to be preserved in amber. It needed to breathe in modern rooms. It needed collaborators from other trance traditions. It needed production that could translate the courtyard circle into headphones without losing the heat.
His first produced album, Focu d’Amore (2010), expanded the ensemble to sixteen musicians and re-arranged historic pieces with new harmonic depth. It was a bridge album. The record that crossed the bridge was Pizzica Indiavolata.
For more on Mauro’s work with Einaudi, see our feature on Ludovico Einaudi: In a Time Lapse.
The Album
Pizzica Indiavolata was released in mid-2012 on Ponderosa Music & Art. Thirteen tracks. Fifty-four minutes. Produced by Mauro Durante, with material written or adapted from traditional sources by the band.
The core lineup at the time included Mauro on violin, voice, and tamburello; Maria Mazzotta on voice (one of the most powerful vocalists in Mediterranean music, who would record six albums with CGS before launching her solo career in 2015); Giulio Bianco on zampogna (Italian bagpipes), harmonica, and winds; and the rest of the ensemble on accordion, guitar, bouzouki, bass, and percussion.
Two guests changed the album’s center of gravity.
Ballaké Sissoko, the Malian kora master, appears on “E Chora’ Tu Anemu,” a song whose title is Griko for “And the wind blows.” The kora’s cascading arpeggios thread through the tamburello’s pulse like a second nervous system. This is not a “feature” in the pop sense. It is a meeting of two trance logics, West African and Mediterranean, two traditions where rhythm serves as passage into altered states, recognizing each other across centuries of separation.
Piers Faccini, the English-Italian singer-songwriter, brings something darker and more personal to “La Voce Toa.” His voice adds earth and smoke against the bright communal choruses, an individual voice inside a collective ritual. The collaboration does not feel grafted. It feels like the circle simply expanded to include another body.
The album’s thesis track is “Nu te fermare”, Salentino dialect for “Don’t stop.” The drumline refuses to sit down. The violin phrases sound polished not by studio processing but by years of use, by the particular friction of rosined horsehair on gut strings played in courtyards since the musicians were teenagers. Vocals organize the room into call-and-response, and suddenly you understand the instruction encoded in the title: the urge to move is not optional. It is the point. This is music that still knows what bodies are for.
The critical response was strong. RootsWorld called it a “magnificent contribution to the ongoing southern Italian renaissance.” Sing Out! magazine praised the vocal work and arrangements. The album propelled CGS onto international stages: WOMEX 2012 in Thessaloniki (the only Italian group invited), SXSW 2013 in Austin, and WOMAD 2013 at Charlton Park, putting Salentine music before audiences it had never reached before.
The Instrument at the Center
Every musical tradition has an instrument that carries its identity. For flamenco, the guitar. For blues, the voice. For pizzica, it is the tamburello.
The Salentine tamburello is a frame drum built from a wooden ring and a goatskin head, fitted with pairs of metal jingles called cimbali. It looks simple. It is not. The technique developed in Salento is distinct from every other Italian regional frame drum style, and the distinction matters because it explains why this particular music induces trance.
The foundation is the thumb slap: a powerful strike at the center of the drum with each beat, creating a deep, punching heartbeat on the skin. Over this, the player executes a rapid hand roll across the drumhead, not a finger-by-finger pattern but a rolling motion of the whole hand that creates a continuous stream of articulated sound. Simultaneously, the wrist of the holding hand moves in constant rotation, shaking the jingles into a shimmering wash. The combined effect is a rhythmic field with no gaps, no silence, no moment where the pulse releases you.
Where Sicilian tamburello playing emphasizes variation and virtuosity, the Salentine approach is defined by power, repetition, and hypnotic continuity. The goal is not display. It is the creation of an unbroken rhythmic environment that the body cannot resist synchronizing with.
Extended playing sessions cause the goatskin to friction-burn the palm. Performers who play for hours commonly wrap their hands in bandages to keep playing through bleeding skin. De Martino documented that many of the tamburello players who performed for the tarantate were women, a tradition with roots reaching back to Mesopotamian priestesses and Dionysian mystery cults.
For the connection between ritual music and healing across traditions, see Exorcism Across Religions and Cultures. For the deeper philosophy of why rhythmic patterns affect consciousness, see The Philosophy of Music: Number, Myth, and Song.
The Greek of Italy’s Heel
There is a detail in the band’s name that most listeners outside Italy miss entirely. Grecanico does not just mean “Greek-flavored.” It refers to the Grecìa Salentina, a cluster of municipalities in the province of Lecce where a population of ethnic Greeks, the Griko, have lived for millennia.
How long? That is debated. The dominant hypothesis, supported by linguists Gerhard Rohlfs and Georgios Hatzidakis, traces the Griko presence to Magna Graecia, the Greek colonies established in southern Italy from the eighth century BCE onward. An alternative theory links it to Byzantine Greek immigration during the sixth through eleventh centuries. The dialect itself preserves archaic-Doric, Hellenistic, and Byzantine layers of Greek, which suggests continuous presence across multiple periods rather than a single wave of settlement.
The traditional Griko-speaking area encompasses nine municipalities, including Calimera, Castrignano dei Greci, Corigliano d’Otranto, Martano, Martignano, Sternatia, Zollino, Soleto, and Melpignano, though active speakers are now concentrated in fewer of them. Italian Law 482 of 1999 formally recognized the Griko communities as a protected linguistic minority. UNESCO classifies Griko as severely endangered. Fewer than 20,000 speakers remain across both Salentine and Calabrian Greek-speaking communities, most of them over fifty. Very few children learn it.
This is the language CGS sings in, alongside Salentino dialect and Italian. Tracks like “E Chora’ Tu Anemu,” “Kali Nifta” (Griko for “Good Night,” one of the most famous Griko songs in existence), and “Pu e’ to rodo t’orio” carry a living specimen of the oldest Greek dialect still spoken in the western Mediterranean. When Rina Durante named the band, she understood that the music and the language were inseparable. Save one, and you have a chance at saving the other.
La Notte della Taranta
The revival that CGS started in relative obscurity during the 1970s exploded into mass culture in 1998, when the first Notte della Taranta was held in Melpignano.
The festival was the brainchild of Sergio Blasi, then deputy mayor of Melpignano, and Massimo Manera, president of the consortium of Grecìa Salentina municipalities. Backed by the Istituto Diego Carpitella (named after the ethnomusicologist who had recorded field material with de Martino in 1959), the inaugural edition was directed by Daniele Sepe under the theme “New Taranta.” Local bands including Officina Zoe performed. Admission was free, a deliberate choice to make the festival accessible to the communities whose music it celebrated.
It grew beyond anyone’s expectations. The format evolved into an itinerant festival touring municipalities across the province of Lecce through the summer, culminating each August in the grand finale Concertone at Melpignano’s Piazza San Giorgio. A different Maestro Concertatore (guest artistic director) leads each year. The names read like a world music hall of fame: Joe Zawinul (2000), Stewart Copeland (2003), Mauro Pagani (2007-2009), Ludovico Einaudi (2010-2011), Goran Bregovic (2012), Giovanni Sollima (2013-2014), Phil Manzanera (2015).
The Concertone typically draws 120,000 to 150,000 attendees, with a record 200,000 at the 25th edition in 2022. It is the largest event dedicated to traditional folk music in Europe.
CGS have been central to the festival since its earliest editions. Mauro Durante has participated since 2000 and served as musical assistant to Einaudi and Bregovic during their tenures. The festival did not create the pizzica revival, but it provided the infrastructure: a stage large enough for the music to reach the ears it had always deserved.
Luigi Chiriatti, the ethnomusicologist who was a founding member of CGS, served as artistic director of the festival’s itinerant program. When he died in May 2023, his archive of approximately 1,600 documents, photographs, interviews, and sound recordings, gathered over nearly fifty years, was acquired by the Municipality of Melpignano. The archive of one man and one band became the archive of a region.
After Pizzica Indiavolata
The albums that followed show a band that refused to repeat itself.
Quaranta (2015) was recorded live-to-tape with no overdubs by producer Ian Brennan, known for his work with Tinariwen and the Zomba Prison Project. The method stripped the music back to its ritual core: what happens when these musicians play together in a room with no safety net. It placed second on the Transglobal World Music Chart and won Blogfoolk’s Best World Album of 2015.
Canzoniere (2017) went the other direction entirely. Produced by Joe Mardin in New York and Lecce, it fused traditional Salentine material with Western pop production. The record won the Songlines Music Awards 2018 for Best Group, making CGS the first Italian ensemble to receive that honor.
Meridiana (2021), co-produced by Justin Adams (Robert Plant’s guitarist, producer of Tinariwen), structured twelve tracks like the twelve hours of a sundial, each exploring a band member’s relationship with time.
And in early 2026, the 50th anniversary album Il Mito (The Legend) appeared: eleven key songs from five decades, newly arranged and recorded by the current lineup. Founding singer Roberto Licci performs alongside his son Emanuele, who is now a full band member. Veteran vocalist Rossella Pinto returns for “Lu rusciu de lu mare.” Ludovico Einaudi composed new piano arrangements for “Taranta.” The album hit number one on the Transglobal World Music Chart in February 2026.
The title refers to a song Rina Durante wrote the lyrics for and Daniele Durante set to music, decades ago: “Il Mito,” which asks how you become a legend when you come from the periphery, from the heel of the boot, from the place the rest of the country forgot.
Fifty years later, the answer is: you play.
The Three Dances
It is worth noting that pizzica is not one thing. The tradition contains at least three distinct forms, each with a different social function.
Pizzica pizzica is the social couple dance, performed by two people (not necessarily romantic partners) inside a circle of onlookers called the ronda. The dancers approach each other but traditionally never touch. The movements suggest flirtation, playfulness, tension. This is the form most people encounter at festivals and concerts today.
Pizzica tarantata is the healing ritual described above, danced alone by the afflicted person, not as performance but as therapy. The movements were not choreographed in any conventional sense: the tarantata moved as the trance dictated, rolling on the ground, spinning, climbing. This form is extinct as a living practice, though its rhythmic structures survive in the music.
Pizzica scherma is the ritual knife-fight dance, performed exclusively by men at Torrepaduli during the vigil of the feast of San Rocco on the night of August 15-16. The fighters extend their index and middle fingers as a blade. Participants were traditionally initiated by experienced practitioners and presented by a compare (guarantor). This form carries traces of a much older martial tradition that once had real blades.
CGS draw from all three streams. Pizzica Indiavolata carries the rhythmic DNA of the tarantata ritual, the communal energy of pizzica pizzica, and the intensity of scherma. The album does not “update” the tradition. It inherits it, the way Mauro inherited it from Daniele, who inherited it from Rina, who inherited it from the villages.
The tamburello hits. The jingles shimmer. The voice calls, and the room answers. Whatever the taranta was, spider or metaphor or something between the two, the cure has not changed in centuries.
Move. Don’t stop. Nu te fermare.
