A holiday in Salento from June to September could be the ideal chance to appreciate and enjoy Salento festivals which are played almost every summer night in the whole Salento peninsula.

As well as tasting traditional food and the good wine, finding out the typical handmade pieces of pottery or white local stone, pietra leccese, you will experience the sounds and the rhythm of Salento through pizzica, a fast and compelling rhythmic dance done to the accompaniment of the traditional tambourine.

The atmosphere is pulsing, whether it is in a modest village festival or during the Notte della Taranta, a great event in Melpignano in August, which has international guest stars and attracts audiences of 15,000.

Pizzica’s origins are very old: though once associated with dancing out the poison of a spider-bite, the pizzica actually arrived in Salento from ancient Greece, its function being therapeutic.

Women, living hard and restricted lives, danced themselves through night and day into a cathartic trance accompanied by the sound of the tambourine. The 29^th of June they went to be blessed at the chapel of St Paul in Galatina – a pizzica and special mass is still held there every June.

Nowadays, pizzica is lived especially by tourists as a rhythmic and involving dance which captures and delights with its notes making a holiday in Salento unforgettable!