Resumen de Salento (Italy), Sixties: “Stendalì” and “La Taranta”
After the second world war, the industrialization and the economic boom, Italy is divided in two very different realities:North and South. These two realities don’t know each other; they have far and different traditions and cultures:North is industrialized and South is agrarian, with the presence of some myth and ritual of Great Greece. So a newsouthern question born.On the end of 1950 and on the Sixties, the ethnologist Ernesto De Martino studies some important rituals of theSouth, in particular of Apulia and Lucania. Tarantism (a ritual of dance and music) and the ritual of the dirge areinvestigated by Ernesto De Martino in some important essays. De Martino’s analysis are the first step to know andunderstand these phenomena and they influence the work of the others: poets, writers, directors, photographers. On1960, Cecilia Mangini makes a documentary about the Apulian dirge: “Stendalì”. The commentary is written by PierPaolo Pasolini. One years late Gianfranco Mingozzi makes “La Taranta”, the first document movie about ApulianTarantism, over the text of the poet Salvatore Quasimodo.The same place: Salento (Apulia); the same time: sixties; the same influence: the studies of De Martino; the presenceof the commentary written by a poet: Pasolini and Quasimodo; the same object: the archaic ritual of the South ofItaly; these elements bind the two documentaries “Stendalì” and “La Taranta”.
