How are you with spiders? The huge, hairy ones? I quite like the small kind, actually, but if I spotted a tarantula scuttling towards me I’d be the first out the door!
Back in the 1400s, the people of Taranto in Southern Italy did more than that. In fact, they behaved very strangely indeed…
In the 15th century, the city of Taranto suffered a strange outbreak of a disease that affected the nerves of its victims, and made them behave very weirdly. They would dance around in a crazy and completely uncontrollable way — a bit like your parents at a party, only much, much worse!
The local people thought that this bizarre behaviour was caused by the bite of the tarantula, for those spiders were hugely common there. They believed that the only way to get rid of the poison was to whirl around and dance, dance, dance! In fact, that’s why one particularly lively Italian dance is still known as the ‘tarantella’ today.
Did you know …
… that ‘tarantula’ is an example of a ‘toponym’ — a word named after a place. English has a lot of them — take a look at these:
TANGERINE — the fruit is named after Tangiers in Morocco where they were first grown.
DENIM — this fabric was first made in Nîmes in France: de Nîmes means ‘from Nîmes’.
JODPHURS — these riding trousers originated in the town of Jodphur in India.
CANARY — these birds were named after the Canary Islands where they lived and bred. (Just so you know, the islands themselves were named by the Romans after the big dogs that lived there: canis was Latin for dog. But that’s another story…)
