tarantella: [18] In the 15th century in southern Italy an epidemic of a curious nervous disorder broke out, one of whose symptoms was an uncontrollable compulsion to whirl and cavort around, as if dancing. The people attributed it to the bite of a spider, the tarantula [16], named after the local town and seaport of Taranto. In due course the dancing came to be rationalized as a method of counteracting the effects of the spider’s bite, and it was named tarantella, a diminutive form of Taranto. The word finally came to stand for a particular type of dance.
