Notte della Taranta and the Salento Summer You Dance Through

You don’t hear the tambourine straight away. First it arrives as a beat in your chest, then you work out it’s coming from a square two streets over. It’s late August, eleven at night, and the tarmac is still giving back the heat of the day. A woman has carried her chair out onto the pavement. A boy runs past with two beers in his hands. Under the bell tower, someone has already started dancing.

This is the Salento summer you don’t watch. You dance it.

What the pizzica really is (and why it isn’t postcard folklore)

To understand La Notte della Taranta, you have to step back a few centuries, into a countryside where women worked the tobacco and wheat fields.

The legend — though it was far more than a legend — told of the bite of the taranta, a spider that got into the body and stayed there. The woman it struck, the tarantata, fell into a crisis no doctor could unpick. The only cure was music. Musicians were called to the house, the furniture pushed aside, a white sheet laid on the floor. And they played for hours, sometimes for days, until the body let go.

In the 1950s the anthropologist Ernesto de Martino came down here to study all of this, and the result was a book published in English as The Land of Remorse. Even now, on 29 June, the chapel of San Paolo in Galatina is a place you enter with a certain quiet on you: this is where the tarantate came after their night of dancing.

Out of that ritual came the pizzica, which today has two souls. There’s the pizzica pizzica, the courtship dance, performed in pairs with a red handkerchief. And there’s the sword dance, the scherma, a symbolic duel fought with the fingers, still danced through the night of 15–16 August at Torrepaduli, around the sanctuary of San Rocco, until dawn.

The Concertone at Melpignano: what to expect

The La Notte della Taranta festival was founded in 1998 and travels each summer through the villages of the Grecìa Salentina, the area where griko is still spoken: Corigliano d’Otranto, Martano, Sternatia, Calimera, Zollino, Martignano. Two weeks of free concerts in village squares, with grandmothers at the windows and the bar tables dragged out onto the flagstones.

Then comes the last Saturday of August, and everything converges on Melpignano.

The Concertone takes place on the forecourt of the former Augustinian convent. It’s free. It draws crowds of well over a hundred thousand. On stage is the Orchestra Popolare La Notte della Taranta — tambourines, violin, button accordion, chitarra battente — led each year by a different maestro concertatore. Over the years the role has gone to names like Stewart Copeland, Ludovico Einaudi, Goran Bregović and Carmen Consoli, each with their own idea of how tradition should meet something else.

The result is never a concert of early music. It’s stranger and more alive than that: centuries of tambourine rhythm folded into a symphonic arrangement, or a rock one, or an electronic one. And tens of thousands of people dancing the same thing at the same moment.

It winds down around three in the morning. Some stay until sunrise.

How to do it properly: practical advice

A few small decisions separate a memorable night from a night spent in traffic.

Leave early. The roads towards Melpignano clog up from mid-afternoon and the parking fills hours before the music starts. The afternoon in the village — the stalls, the smell of pittule frying — is part of the experience anyway.

Look into the shuttles. Coaches from Lecce and neighbouring towns are laid on every year, often alongside extra late trains. For the journey home at three in the morning, it’s by far the easier option.

Travel light. There are no seats; you’re standing on an open forecourt. Water, comfortable shoes, a light layer for the small hours — in August that sounds unlikely, but the wind drops in off the open countryside.

Don’t stop at the Concertone. The festival dates in the smaller villages are the part most visitors miss: smaller crowds, the same musicians, and room to actually dance rather than watch from a distance.

Check the dates. The calendar shifts each year and the maestro concertatore is announced in spring — worth a look at the official site before you book.

More than the taranta: the summer keeps going

August in Salento plays elsewhere too. There are the village sagre, the real ones, where you eat under strings of lights and the band strikes up at nine: the puccia festival, the fried fish one, the snail festival at Cannole. There are the patron saint feasts, where luminarie turn an ordinary street into a cathedral of light. And there’s the night of San Rocco at Torrepaduli, the oldest of them all and the least touristic.

And then there’s Lecce, which stays lit late through August. You don’t have to go far: a tambourine can start up in a courtyard of the old town, between the golden stone of the Lecce baroque and a glass of Negroamaro on the table.

Come and dance with us

Melpignano is a little over half an hour from here. The squares of the Grecìa Salentina, even less.

A few minutes from our hotel, you can head off to the Concertone and come back in the small hours with your ears still ringing, knowing that an unhurried breakfast is waiting and the sea is twenty minutes away. If you’re coming in August, tell us: we’ll help you find your way through the dates, the shuttles and the villages where the pizzica is danced with no stage at all.