Chapter 3, They Want the Pipe. Understand?It was five hours into her flight to London, and Ashley was deeply engrossed in a book she was reading on tarantism in Italy. Tarantism had long fascinated historians. Characterized by an extreme impulse to dance, the illness plagued the citizens of southern Italy for two decades from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century. Now believed to be a psychological malady, tarantism was at the time believed to be caused by the bite of a spider.
Ashley was reading a master work on the subject, Ernesto de Martino's The Land of Remorse: A Study of Southern Italian Tarantism, in the original Italian. Martino focused on the origins and social importance of tarantism, especially for women who danced themselves into a trance in order to ward off death from
