The word “tarantula” predates the scientific recognition of the group most people now associate with that name. In southern Italy, the town of Taranto lent its name to a large wolf spider and to a much larger story: tarantism. Medieval and early modern accounts describe people bitten by a spider who then entered a frenzied state that could be alleviated only by vigorous dancing to specific musical rhythms. Whether these episodes reflected mass psychogenic illness, ergotism, or misattributed bites remains debated, but “tarantula” became attached to a fearsome spider long before naturalists standardized the term. Over time, explorers and collectors carried the name into the Americas, Africa, and Asia and applied it to the hulking, hairy spiders they encountered there. The modern tarantula—family Theraphosidae—thus bears a borrowed name with folkloric baggage. 2. Early Scientific Encounters Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century naturalists struggled to fit large mygalomorph spiders into emerging classification systems. Without microscopes capable of resolving fine structures and with limited access to living specimens, they emphasized size, hairiness, and perceived ferocity. Cabinet specimens were dried, miscolored, and often mislabeled. As colonial collecting expanded, European museums filled with exotic arachnids, and the need for orderly, anatomy-based classification grew more urgent. Nineteenth-century arachnologists began to focus on cheliceral orientation, lung structure, and spinneret arrangement rather than on size alone, drawing a clearer line between the mygalomorphs (which include tarantulas) and the araneomorph spiders. 3. Mythology Across Cultures The tarantula’s presence in folklore is not confined to the Mediterranean. In parts of the Americas, stories cast large spiders as weather signifiers or guardians of underground riches. Some Indigenous narratives associate them with craftsmanship, noting their silk use in burrow construction. In several regions of Africa and Asia, folk medical practices attribute analgesic or antipyretic properties to preparations made from spider parts. Such traditions are not reliable guides to therapy, but they mark the animal’s cultural embeddedness and the long history of human attempts to make sense of an imposing arthropod.