The best popular songs from Salento
La folk music of the Salento, and the pizzica salentina dance, play a particular role in local tradition, being an expression of the culture and history of these people.
We provide you with this useful information to begin your knowledge of the Salento folk music.
Here are some insights:
the most beautiful melodies in griko
Here is a list of the most famous and listened to popular Salento music songs, including love songs:
You can find other videos of songs in Griko language on our in-depth blog.
Songs performed by Bruno Petrachi, an unforgettable folk artist from Lecce, later taken up by his son Enzo Petrachi.
The pizzica-pizzica is the dance and the traditional music of Salento and of the Terra d'Otranto and is part of the tarantella family.
It is characterised by the sound of the tambourine, a frame drum made of goat skin and rattles typical of the area.
There is no certain information about its origin, there are hypotheses that would trace it back to the Dionysian cults very common in the Salento area, but the first written attestations date back to the end of the 18th century.
There are three choreographic traditions in Salento:
The music for all three forms is similar, but not the same.
In the immediate post-war period, pizzica-pizzica underwent a period of abandonment, due to the great wave of migration of the time and the consequent frenetic adherence to modernization.
Furthermore, music connected him to the tarantism ritual, a phenomenon of which those who were affected, even indirectly, tried to remove the memory.
After this period of abandonment, around 1990, when the interest in recovering the tradition began, for the sake of entertainment it was “reinvented” by the actor Giorgio di Lecce, his partner Cristina Ria and the group “Arakne mediterranea”, starting from the little that could be learned from the feast of San Rocco in Torrepaduli, “… has elaborated, with little knowledge of the traditional forms of pizzica-pinch of Salento, an exaggerated dance dramatization of seduction…” (GM Gala).
This form of dance is called neo-pizzica by researchers, because it is a new dance inspired by the original dance.
From that moment on, the neo-pizzica phenomenon was widespread, as this new form of dance immediately proved to be suitable for entertainment and was also easily available, while the recovery of the traditional dance required a considerable amount of work.
In fact, neo-pizzica was adopted to advertise events, by revival groups to entertain the public and at large events.
Meanwhile, researchers continued to work to collect the last fragments and put them together, reconstructing the great mosaic of the traditional dance.
Today we have two forms of dance:
a traditional one, very close to the original one, polite and distinguished, which respects the strict rules of the past
and the other very spectacularized.
Today we see the neo-pizzica (called pizzica by everyone) in the Taranta Night Festival, at summer parties and in promotional films for tourists, while the original one is practiced by amateurs at small parties and in spontaneous rounds after summer parties.
Fencing is a “devotional dance duel”.
Originally, “knife fencing” and “agro-pastoral fencing” or “stick fencing” were popular duels, widely practiced during the Kingdom of Naples until they became a real public order problem, which despite being prohibited, lasted until the twenty years of fascism.
When the penalties became more severe, expedients began to be devised, real duels without weapons disguised as a dance, a way to avoid incurring the penalties provided by law.
But even during these "dance duels", when the atmosphere heated up, knives would appear and the situation would degenerate, so even these were then poorly tolerated by the guardians of the law and so they began to be practiced during the holidays, as a devotional rite.
In Salento it has always been practiced during the feast of San Rocco in Torrepaduli, remaining intact to the present day.
It can still be admired on the night between 15 and 16 August in the small hamlet of Ruffano.
Tarantism was a choreographic-musical practice for the treatment of some disorders, which popular belief considered to be the consequence of the bite of a spider, which in Salento is called “Taranta”.
The oldest document that attests to the link between music and tarantula is the -Sertum Papale de Venenis- written, presumably by Guglielmo di Marra from Padua in 1362, which states that «those who are bitten by the tarantula derive maximum pleasure from this or that music».
The second person to document this connection through direct experience was the 17th century doctor from Mesagne Epifanio Ferdinando, who claimed that the sweat produced by dancing expelled the toxins of the poison.
After them, many others became interested in the phenomenon, but we cannot say when the use of pizzica-pizzica or tarantellas in general began to cure tarantism, because we have no sources that attest to it, just as we cannot say whether tarantellas were born first as music for recreational dance or first as a curative dance.
The most complete work we have today is the ethnographic research in 1959, aimed at verifying whether tarantism was a specific disease or rather, the manifestation of a rite of passage.
The team led by Ernesto de Martino interviewed women and men bitten by the tarantula, or their relatives, and personally witnessed the tarantula ritual, even following the pilgrimage to the chapel of San Paolo in Galatina, considered the protector of tarantulas, recording and filming everything.
The scientific report was published in “Terra del rimorso” edited by Il saggiatore in 1962, a book that is still widely used by researchers and in documentary “La Taranta” by Gianfranco Mingozzi.
Today tourists witness re-enactments during the feast of Saints Peter and Paul in Galatina on June 29, but these are also symbolic events.
Salento.it thanks
Pizzica was born as a therapeutic music that was played in homes to free the “pizzicate” from the bite of the tarantula.
The Taranta was the spider, also called the tarantula, who during the harvest period in the fields, could pinch women under their clothes.
From here it is clear the difference between Pizzica and Taranta.
In Salento, the “Tarantate” were women who during the summer season, on harvest days, were sometimes “bitten” by the spider, the so-called Taranta.
And with the bite, here is the crisis:
The tarantate were sitting in a dark room of the house, lying on a white sheet on the floor.
Holding a handkerchief of a symbolic color: red, green or blue.
The music started, the pinch pinch, represented by a violin, an accordion and a tambourine, typical instruments of Salento culture.
The musicians intoned the first notes of this tarantella, and the tarantata began to get agitated, stood up, rolled on the ground, with convulsive movements aimed at eliminating the poison of the bite of the tarantula.
Every June 28th and 29th the tarantate of Salento they were “brought” on the day of Saint Peter and Paul, to Galatina.
In the chapel of San Paolo, the “tarantate” were brought to drink the water from the well, in order to find healing.
Le pinched by the Taranta they ask the Saint for grace, and after the end of a frenetic dance, they free themselves.
Here you can find various insights: