Many large, hairy spiders of the tropics and subtropics are called tarantulas.
But this name, derived from the city of Taranto in southern Italy, was originally applied only to a European spider, not related to the big, hairy “tarantulas.”
The bite of the European tarantula was believed to cause a disease, known as tarantism, that caused people to break into a frenzied dance.
There is no truth in this, but during the 15th to 17th centuries, tarantism hysteria led people who imagined that they had been bitten by a tarantula to dance to exhaustion as they did the tarantella.
The tarantella a frenetic dance that they believed to be both a symptom of and a cure for tarantism.
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