Vita Sotto il Sole: Matera

To finish my tour of the south, I went to Matera which is in the province of Basilicata, in the arch of the boot. Again, I took about 200 pictures, but in this case photos just don’t do this town justice. If you have seen the movie “Passion of the Christ” you have actually seen some great footage of Matera. The movie was shot here because the area of the Sassi looks so much like ancient Jerusalem.

This town is built into the cliff walls on two ravines. There is the city center, which is relatively new, the 1200’s, and then the two Sassi regions which date back some 7000 years ago. The Sassi are a collection of cave dwellings carved right into the walls of the cliffs. The rock here is called tufo and is actually really soft and workable. Matera’s cave dwellings are some of the oldest inhabited human settlements in the world. Until the 1950’s the Sassi were still largely occupied by peasants. The cave houses did not have running water or electricity and were a symbol of abject poverty. The city center, which is on top of the plateau, is set up so all of the buildings have their back to the two sassi, an attempt to ignore how poor the peasants were. To reach the sassi you have to go down steps on the edge of the main piazzas and you really do feel like you are crossing into a different kind of place. In the 1950’s the government came into Matera and forcibly moved the peasants out of the sassi and into government built housing in the newly created suburbs. They did this because they deemed the unsanitary conditions of the cave dwellings to be unacceptable. Frequently, as many as 12 people along with their chickens, a horse, and a pig all lived in 3 rooms carved into the rock. There are a couple of museums that are still set up with the original furniture and tools of a typical family living in the sassi. Apparently, residents of the sassi didn’t beg for money, they begged for quinine to fight the raging malaria in the sassi. The infant mortality rate was 50%. It is absolutely unbelievable to think that people still lived this way in the 1950’s in Italy.

The sassi has now become a World Heritage site and has seen a lot of renovations. People again occupy the cave dwellings with modern updates of electricity and running water. Many of the old caves have become restaurants, hotels, and shops. My hotel was actually an old Neolithic temple carved right into the cliff. We are talking about 3000 years old! The place was amazing. In the Sassi Caveoso, many of the cave dwellings are still abandoned and you can actually go into them, or at least I did. There are also about 150 chiese rupestri, or rock churches in the two sassi districts. About 7 of these churches still have some of the 11th century frescoes on their carved out walls. While standing outside the entrance to one of these churches, along the edge of the cliff, you can look across the ravine to the Murgia plateau which is the site where they filmed the crucifixion scene from the “Passion”. It really does leave you speechless.

The people in Matera were very friendly as well. I met two Canadian women on the train to Matera who were also staying at my hotel. We had drinks one night and dinner the next at a great little local Osteria. It only had 6 tables outside and the chef, who I’m pretty sure drank his way through the night, came to each table and decided what you should eat. He spoke a combination of English and Italian that really made no sense when put together, but his motions and sound effects somehow gave it all context. He was hilarious and the food and wine were outstanding!