Book Reviews
The Land of Remorse: A Study of Southern Italian Taran-
tism, by Ernesto De Martino, translated and annotated by
Dorothy Louise Zinn. London, Free Association Books,
2005.
Davide Torsello
University of Bergamo, Italy
The Land of Remorse is one of Ernesto De Martino’s best
known books in Italy. De Martino, who is considered the
founding father of Italian anthropology, is not enough
known outside the country, in spite of George Saunders’
work. The book is the result of an ethnographic research
conducted in the Salentine peninsula, Italy’s southeastern-
most region, in summer 1959. Even though the research
may seem outdated, and in a way De Martino’s approach
is a product of his time, the book introduces a phenom-
enon studied in the moment when it underwent profound
changes. Thus, the research constitutes an important
contribution to the understanding of cultural and histori-
cal processes underpinning southern Italy’s problematic
socio-economic progress. Moreover, as it will be seen
below, the book sheds lights onto a cultural phenomenon
which has recently been re-evaluated in the politics of
culture of these lands.
The Land of Remorse (the Italian word rimorso is appo-
sitely used to indicate both “remorse” and “re-byte”) deals
with the study of the phenomenon known as tarantism.
The word tarantism stems out of the tarantula spider (with
probable connections to the city of Taranto), which in these
lands was said to byte male and female victims and provoke
in them a psychic shock of the medical type of latrodec-
tism. Those bitten by the spider experienced sudden and
irreprehensible states of confusion, melancholia, madness
and became extremely sensitive to music. This latter was
the only efficient therapy against the bytes. The tarantati
(those affected by the bytes) were cured by long hours of
dance at the sound of the popular tarantella of the region
(recently termed pizzica, byte), played by groups of musi-
cians invited and sponsored by the family of the patient.
The tarantato danced until achieving recovering, and this
was linked to the miraculous intervention of St. Paul, the
protector of the tarantati. De Martino attempts to explain
the historical origin of the tarantism with the help of an
interdisciplinary research team, one of the first attempts
in this direction, made of an ethnomusicologist, a medical
doctor, a psychologist, a psychiatrist and a cultural anthro-
pologist. His research goal is to confute the thesis that the
tarantism would be confined to a mere form of disease, and
to look instead for its historical and religious roots.
The book is divided in three sections. The Introduc-
tion starts from the historical origin of southern Italy’s
“backwardness” to articulate the author’s perspective to the
The Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Europe
Volume 8 • Number 1 • Spring/Summer 2008
35
study of resistance to hegemonic culture. The first section
introduces the empirical data gathered in the Salentine
peninsula. He explores tarantism with a psychoanalytic
focus on the tarantati’s individual crises related to adoles-
cence, the dramatic losses of one of the parents or a force-
ful marriage (Chapter Three). The “symbolic autonomy” of
tarantism is expressed through the use of colors, animals
(from the spider to snakes and scorpions), seasons (sum-
mer in relationship to the heat and harvest) and saints.
All these elements play significant roles in the illness and
its therapy (Chapters Four, Five, and Seven). In Chapter
Six there is an attempt, original compared to the main
thrust of the book, to analyze tarantism from an economic
perspective. De Martino suggests (although he does not
provide satisfactory data on this) that the phenomenon
impacted in different ways on the economic conditions of
the families involved, creating debts to the side of those
affected by it and credits for the musicians.
The second section (Chapters Eight–Thirteen) explores
the “choreutic-musical chromatic exorcism” from the
single elements of its symbolism. The objects which are
deposed ritually on the scene (from colorful ribbons to
images of St. Paul), the different variety of music which is
strictly related to the kind of spider that bitted the victim,
the colors that the spider likes are all symbolic ingredients
used to re-create order around the affected person. She
(out of fourteen cases studied only four were males) needs
the therapy to overcome “an unresolved conflict in which
the individual presence has remained imprisoned” (p.
129). The symbolic order imposed over the patient by the
complexity of the ritual and by its seasonal repetition—the
oldest of the tarantati has been dancing for sixty years—
has the power of restoring the psychic unity of the patient.
The third section, entitled “Historical Commentary”
(Chapters Fourteen–Twenty) constitutes De Martino’s
attempt to trace the historical-religious foundations of
tarantism. First, he undertakes a comparative analysis
of the phenomenon with others observed in Africa (the
Sudanese bori and the Ethiopian-Egyptian zar), Haiti
(voodoo) and Sardinia (argia). Later he moves to relate
the symbolisms of particular moments in the exorcism
(the sting, the oscillations of the dancer and the “musi-
cal catharsis”) to certain aspects of Greek mythology.
Chapters Eighteen through Twenty contain the core of De
Martino historical analysis. He individuates the origin of
tarantism in pre-Christian orgiastic cults and maenadism
as regularly functioning socio-cultural institutions that
maintained order among those affected by psychological
crises of individual presence. It was under the influence
of Christianity, during the Middle Ages, and the uncer-
tainty brought about by the Turkish menace after the Sack
of Otranto (1480) that tarantism became integrated with
“hegemonic cultural phenomena” (p. 217). If Catholicism
36 Book Reviews

transformed the ritual adding to it a marked hagiographic
character, it also contributed to hasten its deterioration.
The refusal of the natural-magic “involution” of the Coun-
ter-Reformation period brought about, under the Neapoli-
tan Enlightenment, the reformulation of the phenomenon.
The several scholarly analyses of the late eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries definitively pulled this phenomenon
out of the sphere of magic and paganism to infer a typical
medical formulation. Tarantism became a kind of illness,
and “the historically conditioned efficacy of its horizons of
recovery and re-integration gradually diminished” (p.247).
The book is also accompanied by forty-six pictures
of various moments of the tarantism, five appendices
compiled by each of the researchers and a foreword by
Vincent Crapanzano. The volume has been translated and
annotated by Dorothy Zinn, a US anthropologist living
in Basilicata, the region visited by Edward Banfield in the
1950s. The translation work is extremely diligent, particu-
larly helpful are Zinn’s explanatory notes on De Martino’s
intellectual background. The timeliness of The Land of
Remorse cannot be wholly appreciated without reference
to the present cultural transformation of tarantism, that
in many aspects make up an equally interesting field of
anthropological enquiry. The Salentine peninsula has
recently re-discovered the interest in tarantism as part of
a wider body of cultural, artistic and political phenomena.
The tarantella music, in these lands known as pizzica, is
today played by a hundred of bands which, drawing on
a rather poor repertoire, engage in the re-adaptation and
transformation of melodies today used less to exorcise
and more and more for financial other than entertainment
purposes. Tarantism (in the form presently accepted by
local scholars, anthropologists and the like as “neo-taran-
tism”) has become one of the identity markers of these
lands, which still suffer of the many problems affecting all
of southern Italian regions, as it is used as a regional flag of
a place that some have called the “Italian Jamaica.” Apart
from t-shirts, wine and even football, neo-tarantism has
provided a fruitful political investment for those village
mayors, such as the one of Melpignano host of the Taranta
Night, the largest music events in Southern Italy and one
of the best known in the country, which managed to estab-
lish a solid position in the regional administration. Obvi-
ously De Martino and his team could not be able to foresee
the last stage of the “deterioration” of this phenomenon,
which still keeps its genuine Mediterranean vigor.

The Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Europe

Volume 8 • Number 1 • Spring/Summer 2008