Tarantella

Tarantella, dance originating in southern Italy. In its most common modern form it is a flirtatious couple dance to music in ½ metre, constantly increasing in speed, and typically accompanied by castanets and a tambourine. During the Middle Ages, and in some parts of southern Italy even in modern times, ecstatic solo dancing of the tarantella was thought to cure a form of insanity supposedly induced by the bite of the largest of European spiders, the wolf spider, or tarantula. The name tarantella may be derived, however, from that of the Italian city of Taranto.