Research carried out by Ernesto De Martino (1908-65) in the field of the anthropology of music in the 1950s is of outstanding importance in Italian scholarship and deserves attention both from an historical perspective and for the particular approach his work proposes to the study of the human dimension in music. De Martino made the most original contributions to the progress of anthropological studies in Italy in the post-war period and worked out some of his more interesting theoretical proposals through the study of musical phenomena of southern Italy. Two volumes are particularly representative of his output: Morte e pianto rituale (Death and Ritual Mourning), published in 1958, and La terra del rimorso (The Land of Remorse), a book devoted to the phenomenon of tarantism, which appeared in 1961. The publication dates of these works are important because they belong to that crucial period in the history of musical studies when the discipline established in the first half of the century under the name of “comparative musicology” changed its name to ethnomusicology. At the same time, a new trend in scholarly research was established with the primary goal of assimilating the study of music within the larger framework of the study of culture. De Martino's volumes were published during the ten-year period that separates David McAllester's Enemy Way Music (1954) and Alan P. Merriam's The Anthropology of Music (1964). This synchronism becomes especially interesting when one considers that no direct relationship existed between the trends that were developing in American ethnomusicology and the works of De Martino, who was educated in philosophical studies and whose main field of research was the history of religions. From this perspective, the consideration of De Martino's work can broaden our view of an important period in the history of musical studies. For although the point of departure of his work was different from those adopted by Anglo-American scholars, De Martino's results were also a clear endorsement of the anthropological approach to the study of musical phenomena, and they were proposed at a time when the same interests began flourishing in the scholarly world at large.