The Chapel of Saint Paul, Galatina

The Chapel of Saint Paul stands in the old quarter of Galatina, a small town in the Salento peninsula of Puglia. For centuries, it was the destination for people suffering from tarantism, a condition attributed to the bite of the tarantula spider.

The Dance Cure

Those afflicted, mostly women, arrived at the chapel in states of distress. They wept, screamed, threw themselves on the ground, and demanded music. Local musicians played the pizzica tarantata, a rapid, rhythmic melody, and the tarantati danced. They danced for hours, sometimes days, until exhaustion broke the spell. The cure was attributed to Saint Paul, who according to local tradition had granted the people of Galatina immunity to poison during his passage through Puglia.

Ancient Roots

The ethnographer Ernesto de Martino studied tarantism in the 1950s and documented the last active cases at the chapel. He argued that the phenomenon connected to ecstatic rites far older than Christianity, possibly related to the cult of Dionysus, which had flourished in southern Italy twenty-five hundred years earlier. The music, the trance, the communal witnessing: the structure was the same. The names had changed.

The Chapel Today

The last documented cases of tarantism at the chapel occurred in the 1950s. The pizzica has survived as a folk music tradition in Salento, now performed at festivals. The chapel remains a functioning place of worship. A well inside the chapel once provided water believed to cure spider bites.