ABSTRACT
Confusions of various kinds, palatable or not, are often engendered by confrontations with a country's myths and legends. When viewed by outsiders, these tales frequently come to represent the strangeness of the host culture and thus provide a narrative or symbolic map for navigating the difference between the observer and the observed. The imaginative transformation, however, from interested spectator to active participant comes from setting foot on the landscapes within which these stories are played out and making judgements about the nature of the lived reality that they help to animate. In Southern Italy, in addition to saintly interventions, pagan rituals, and random sprites, there are specific legendary figures or practices that are autochthonous. Tarantismo and sirens are the most prominent, and their existence is part of a cultural history mixing fable and ritual that belongs nowhere else and to which, in one way or another, most of these travellers are intelligently alert. The region allows them to—indeed demands that they—reread their own cultural assumptions.
