In short. Pizzica is the trance dance of the Salento, and the Notte della Taranta is the festival built around it — the largest popular music festival in Italy. The final concert is at Melpignano, on a night in late August, and it draws crowds in the hundreds of thousands.
If you are in Puglia in August and you only do one thing, do this one. It is not a folklore show put on for visitors: it is a living tradition that happens to have become enormous.
🕷️ What pizzica actually is
Pizzica belongs to the family of southern Italian tarantella dances, and it comes from a specific and very strange belief: that a woman bitten by a spider — the taranta — could only be cured by dancing the poison out of her body, for hours, sometimes for days, to the beat of a tambourine.
Whether or not anyone was really bitten is beside the point. What the ritual gave was a socially permitted way for women in a closed rural society to lose control in public. The tarantate danced, and the village watched, and afterwards life went back to normal.
Where it happened. The chapel of Saints Peter and Paul at Galatina was the place the tarantate were brought. It is still there, and the tradition is still remembered in the town — this is not a distant medieval story, it was documented into the twentieth century.
🎪 The Notte della Taranta
The festival takes its name from that ritual. It runs through the towns of the Grecìa Salentina — the Greek-speaking villages of the Salento — with around twenty stops, and it ends with the Concertone, the big concert, at Melpignano.
Each year a Maestro Concertatore is appointed: a musician who arranges the traditional repertoire and brings their own guests. The 2026 edition, the 29th, is directed by Ermal Meta, and its theme is Le vie del Mediterraneo — the Mediterranean as a place where cultures meet.
Notte della Taranta 2026
Concertone: Saturday 22 August 2026, Melpignano (Lecce)
Maestro Concertatore: Ermal Meta
Theme: Le vie del Mediterraneo
Before that: around 20 stops across the Grecìa Salentina
Admission: free
🎻 What you will actually hear
Tambourines first — the tamburello is the engine of the whole thing — then violin, accordion, guitar, and voices singing in Salentine dialect and sometimes in griko, the Greek dialect still spoken in a handful of villages here. The tempo is fast and it does not let up.
The Concertone is a large production with an orchestra and guest stars. The smaller stops on the tour, in village squares, are closer to what the music was before anyone put a stage under it — and for many people they are the better night out.
📍 If you are going
- It is free, and it is very crowded. Melpignano is a small town.
- Go early, and expect to walk from wherever you park.
- It runs late — the Concertone goes well past midnight.
- The tour stops across the Grecìa Salentina are easier, smaller and free too.
For the 2026 edition specifically — the date, the conductor, the line-up and how to get there — see the Concertone of 22 August 2026.
Dates and line-ups for the Notte della Taranta are confirmed each summer. Check the official festival channels before travelling — this page describes the 2026 edition.
