This afternoon, at 6.30 pm, in the Franciscan culture hall of the Parish of Santa Caterina d’Alessandria, a meeting is scheduled with the writer and journalist Angelo Angelastro, author, together with Pierpaolo De Giorgi, of the book “Leultima tarantate ”, published by Congedo di Galatina in 2022: today’s event, after the institutional greeting from President Mario Graziuso, will be introduced by Councilor Rosa Anna Valletta.
The Congedo publisher’s catalog allows us to reconstruct the genesis of our guest’s text.
“In the summer of 2017 Pierpaolo De Giorgi participated, together with the group I Tamburellisti di Torrepaduli, in one of the most beautiful cultural programs on television, the ‘Persone’ column on Rai 1, created and directed by the editor-in-chief of Tg1 Angelo Angelastro. During the filming, between pinch fencing and a display of frame drums, Angelastro confided to De Giorgi that he kept numerous photos of tarantate taken by him during a television report back in 1978. The black and white images were ‘captured ‘ during the public ceremony near the famous Galatina chapel, from behind a grate that hid the photographer and his reflex camera as much as possible. They capture excited moments during which the tarantate assume revealing attitudes and poses of great symbolic value. De Giorgi proposes to accompany them with a writing that unravels the tangle of tarantism and brings to light some aspects that had never previously been discussed. In particular, the scholar intends to show how tarantism is a resource traditionally managed by the women of the family, and not an illusory therapeutic rite that reveals the ‘landslides of the psyche’ of female people who are victims of oppression and erotic foreclosures. Not much time passes and Mario Congedo, the publisher of Galatina, is involved who, more than anyone else in Italy, has shown sensitivity to the extravagant events of the musical and dance ritual that occurred in the chapel of the tarantate”.
Thus was born an agile, informative volume, without giving in to easy and erroneous reconstructions of one of the most interesting traditional phenomena of the entire Mediterranean.
Angelo Angelastro, a journalist with Rai since 1977, has followed cultural and entertainment events in Italy and abroad, giving voice to the great protagonists of music, literature, cinema, theater and dance.
He has edited numerous specials and created the “Tg1 Incontri” and “Tg1 People” columns, programs in which men and women talk about the main themes of our time through their lives.
In 2013 he published Mondi mie, Bolis edizioni, with a commentary by Gianni Berengo Gardin on photojournalism. However, in 2015 Il bel tempo di Tripoli was released by Edizioni E/O, a novel that addresses a central and still dark chapter in the history of Italy: our colonial past. The first-hand interview of a reporter, the author, with a fascist hierarch of the time becomes the basis for the novel of a true life, lived on the brink of the century.
Mario Graziuso
