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Updated: May 11, 2025
That’s about the figure of it; but no word-painting can give an idea of the spirit, the ‘go’ of the tarantella when danced for love and not for money.”
A hermit who offers sour wine, a fat middle-aged woman, a figure of fun in her gay be-ribboned dress who begins languidly dancing a tarantella, and a vulgar pestilent guide who produces a spy-glass usually haunt these caverns on the look-out for any chance visitor.
He sat down on the grass, put his hand on his knees, and looked back at the rock and at the precipices. "I'm glad I can do that!" he said. Something within him was revelling, was dancing a tarantella as the sun came up, lifting its blood-red rim above the sea-line in the east. He looked over the trees. "Maddalena saw us!" he cried.
But the abandon is so happy as to seem misplaced in a tarantella, that dance whose traditional origin is the maniacal frenzy produced by the bite of the tarantula. This is better, to me, than Heller's familiar piece. The "Second Gavotte" is a noble work, the naïve gaiety of classicism being enriched with many of the great, pealing chords the modern piano is so fertile in.
Miss Brabazon having come to the close of a complicated and dreary sonata, I heard Margrave abruptly ask her if she could play the Tarantella, that famous Neapolitan air which is founded on the legendary belief that the bite of the tarantula excites an irresistible desire to dance.
Again Artois thought of Sicilian boys dancing the tarantella, and when they were in the small smoke-room, which Caminiti had fitted up in what he believed to be Oriental style, and which, though scarcely accurate, was quite cosey, he was moved to inquire: "Pardon me, monsieur, but are you entirely English?" "No, monsieur. My mother has Sicilian blood in her veins.
Phoebe Marks was exactly the sort of a girl who is generally promoted from the post of lady's maid to that of companion. She had just sufficient education to enable her to understand her mistress when Lucy chose to allow herself to run riot in a species of intellectual tarantella, in which her tongue went mad to the sound of its own rattle, as the Spanish dancer at the noise of his castanets.
They went through their repertory, which included a great deal more than the tarantella, and which we applauded with an enthusiasm attested by our contributions when the tambourine went round. Then they repeated their selections, and at the second collection we guests of the hotel repeated our contributions, but in a more guarded spirit.
"Ah," said Hermione, "I know it's the tarantella!" She clapped her hands. "It only wanted that," she said to Maurice. "Only that the tarantella!" "Guai Lucrezia!" cried Gaspare, tyrannically. Lucrezia bounded to one side, bent her body inward, and giggled with all her heart. Sebastiano leaned his back against a column and put the flute to his lips. "Here, Maurice, here!" said Hermione.
That settled it. He came from Mazzara in Sicily, whither they still carry, to his lonely shrine, epileptics and others distraught in mind. And were I in a discursive mood, I would endeavour to trace some connection between his establishment here and the tarantella between St. Vitus' dance and that other one which cured, they say, the bite of the Tarentine spider.
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