Maria Mazzotta has certainly kept some traces from her punk-rock adolescence in Puglia, the heel of the Italian boot, the energy and anger carried by her hoarse, torn voice, and blue and purplish streaks in her jet Mediterranean hair. This has been less evident in her musical career, which for the past two decades has been devoted to perpetuating and renewing the tradition of pizzica, a regional variety of tarantella.

The tarantella, associated with tarentism, was a therapeutic and cathartic rite aimed at curing the bites of a spider – supposedly the tarantula – by dancing to a frenetic rhythm (in 6/8 bar). Both the practice and the bug share the same etymology as the Apulian city of Taranto, where the phenomenon was first observed, before it was transformed into a bastion of steel and became Europe's most polluted city, with a catastrophic health record.

A native of Lecce, on the Salento peninsula, from 2000 to 2015 Mazzotta was linked to Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino, a collective that revived this pizzica that had fallen into disrepair when it was formed in 1975. Since then, it has undergone a spectacular renaissance, symbolized by the 1998 creation of the La Notte della Taranta festival in the village of Melpignano, whose orchestra Mazzotta joined eight years later. "Today, there's a lot of tourism linked to pizzica," she said, speaking in French. "When I started, it only survived in small villages, with elderly people. It was still a peasant culture."

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