Notte della Taranta on:
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Night of 
The Night of Tarantula is focused on
Tarantula
Tarantulas comprise a group of large and often hairy spiders of the family Theraphosidae. , 1,040 species have been identified, with 156 genera. The term "tarantula" is usually used to describe members of the family Theraphosidae, although ...
(''La Notte della Taranta'') is a music festival
A music festival is a community event with performances of singing and instrument playing that is often presented with a theme such as musical genre (e.g., rock, blues, folk, jazz, classical music), nationality, locality of musicians, or h ...
in Salento
Salento ( Salentino: ''Salentu'', Salentino Griko: ''Σαλέντο'') is a cultural, historical and geographic region at the southern end of the administrative region of Apulia in Southern Italy. It is a sub-peninsula of the Italian Peninsula ...
, Apulia
it, Pugliese
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, Italy.
The Night of Tarantula is focused on Pizzica
Pizzica () is a popular Italian folk dance, originally from the Salento peninsula in Apulia and later spreading throughout the rest of Apulia and the regions of Calabria and eastern Basilicata.
It is part of the larger family of tarantella.
...
, a popular folk genre in Salento, and takes place in various municipalities in the province of Lecce
Lecce ( ); el, label=Griko, Luppìu, script=Latn; la, Lupiae; grc, Λουπίαι, translit=Loupíai), group=pron is a historic city of 95,766 inhabitants (2015) in southern Italy. It is the capital of the province of Lecce, the province ...
and the Grecìa Salentina
Grecìa Salentina (Griko for " Salentine Greece") is an area in the peninsula of Salento in southern Italy, near the town of Lecce which is inhabited by the Griko people, an ethnic Greek minority in southern Italy who speak Griko, a variant of ...
, especially in Melpignano
Melpignano (Griko: ; Salentino: ) is a small town and ''comune'' in the province of Lecce in Apulia, Italy. It is one of the nine towns of Grecìa Salentina. Melpignano has a population of 2,209 inhabitants (called Melpignanesi) and an area ...
. It gives great importance to the folk music tradition of Taranta and Pizzica, and it is a resource for tourism in Apulia.
The festival tours around Salento, normally culminating in a grand finale concert in Melpignano in August, which lasts until late night. An average of 120,000 spectators attend the last concert every year. The festival started in 1998 by an initiative of several municipalities of the Salento, which sponsored the event. Every year a new musical director is chosen.
Grecìa Salentina
Folk festivals in Italy
Music festivals established in 1998
Italian traditions
{{Music-festival-stub