Athanasius Kircher: Tarantella Napoletana, Tono Hypodorico

Performing Artist: L'Arpeggiata, Christina Pluhar, Lucilla Galeazzi, Alfio Antico
Album: La Tarantella: Antidotum Tarantulae

Philologist, scientist, collector, author of works of physics, astronomy, Egyptology, music, Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680), the "master of one hundred arts", as his contemporaries defined him, was the most prestigious exponent of Baroque Encyclopedism . Kircher's interest in tarantism, which in his work condensed all the leitmotifs of Baroque culture starting from the gnoseological value of Aristotle's "wonder" understood as the beginning of all knowledge, derived from the interest in the prodigious therapeutic virtues of music .

In 1630, after a trip to Puglia to learn more about the musical therapies related to the cult of Dionysus, the Jesuit abbot Athanasius Kircher exalted in "Musurgia universalis" the therapeutic value of music to cure the effects of the tarantula bite. Using the information of the fathers Nicolello and Galliberto, rectors of the Jesuit colleges of Lecce and Taranto, Kircher wrote of tarantismo in three works, Magnes, Musurgia and Phonurgia rich in precious data on popular beliefs, the behaviors of tarantati, the musical instruments used and above all transcriptions of the oldest examples of musical antidotes against the bite of the tarantula (such as the famous Antidotum Tarantulae).