The spiders we think of as tarantulas are not really tarantulas at all. In fact, the original tarantula is a relatively small, innocuous wolf spider. It lives in southern Europe, including around the city of Taranto in southern Italy, from which it gets its name.
In bygone centuries, Lycosa tarantula had a fearsome reputation. Local peasants believed its bite to be lethal and came up with a novel antidote to its venom: a frenzied dance known as the Tarantella.
In fact, the Taranto tarantula is not dangerous at all and local peasants had failed to identify the species responsible for lethal bites. "They were probably being bitten by the local black widow," says Dave Clarke, head of invertebrates at London Zoo in the UK.
Nevertheless, the fear of the wolf spider from Taranto endured. So when European explorers began to encounter even bigger, hairier and more fearsome spiders on their travels to South America, they just called them tarantulas too
