as the beginning of the seventeenth, or at furthest the
end of the sixteenth century.

The music was almost wholly in the Turkish style (aria Turchesca), and
the ancient songs of the peasantry of Apulia, which increased in number
annually, were well suited to the abrupt and lively notes of the Turkish
drum and the shepherd's pipe. These two instruments were the favourites
in the country, but others of all kinds were played in towns and
villages, as an accompaniment to the dances of the patients and the songs
of the spectators. If any particular melody was disliked by those
affected, they indicated their displeasure by violent gestures expressive
of aversion. They could not endure false notes, and it is remarkable
that uneducated boors, who had never in their lives manifested any
perception of the enchanting power of harmony, acquired, in this respect,
an extremely refined sense of hearing, as if they had been initiated into
the profoundest secrets of the musical art. It was a matter of every
day's experience, that patients showed a predilection for certain
tarantellas, in preference to others, which gave rise to the composition
of a great variety of these dances. They were likewise very capricious
in their partialities for particular instruments; so that some longed for
the shrill notes of the trumpet, others for the softest music produced by
the vibration of strings.

Tarantism was at its greatest height in Italy in the seventeenth century,
long after the St. Vitus's Dance of Germany had disappeared. It was not
the natives of the country only who were attacked by this complaint.
Foreigners of every colour and of every race, negroes, gipsies,
Spaniards, Albanians, were in like manner affected by it. Against the
effects produced by the tarantula's bite, or by the sight of the
sufferers, neither youth nor age afforded any protection; so that even
old men of ninety threw aside their crutches at the sound of the
tarantella, and, as if some magic potion, restorative of youth and
vigour, were flowing through their veins, joined the most extravagant
dancers. Ferdinando saw a boy five years old seized with the dancing
mania, in consequence of the bite of a tarantula, and, what is almost
past belief, were it not supported by the testimony of so credible an eye-
witness, even deaf people were not exempt from this disorder, so potent
in its effect was the very sight of those affected, even without the
exhilarating emotion