Imagine a destination where time has stood still. Where stone houses carved into the rock create a labyrinth of narrow streets, and every corner reveals a new story. A trip to Matera is an experience that overflows with magic and authenticity.
This hidden stone city in southern Italy, with its iconic sassi and the cave dwellings that look as though they were painted onto a canvas of centuries, is a rare jewel for adventurous travellers. Designated a European Capital of Culture, Matera offers ways of living and opportunities for exploration that you will not find anywhere else.
Discover what makes this magical destination truly unrepeatable, and why thousands of visitors seek out the passage into another world here every year.
Matera has its own remarkable history. It is carved into a ravine in the countryside of the Basilicata region, at the instep of the «boot» of the Italian peninsula. The city was once branded «the shame of Italy». It owed this disparaging label to the caves in which its poor inhabitants were housed. In the 1970s Matera turned into a ghost town. For the first time in 10,000 years the settlement was left uninhabited. But a decade later its imposing beauty laid the foundations for an astonishing rebirth. This was helped along by the creativity of a group of local entrepreneurs (many of them descended from the earlier residents) who saw the potential of this exceptional place.
Today the city’s historic churches stand beside boutique hotels, galleries and restaurants housed in former cave dwellings. Matera is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In 2019 it was European Capital of Culture, while relatively recently it also «starred» in another major Hollywood production – the latest film in the James Bond series.
A BBC journalist visited the Italian city and met Antonio Nicoletti, a civil engineer and director of the Basilicata tourism board, in Piazza Vittorio Veneto. He recalls the buzz and the anticipation that filled that very spot back in 1991. «When I was much younger, this area was an ordinary asphalt road with cars, parking and a few flower beds. One day, when I was 17, one of the flower beds collapsed.»
It turned out that the flower bed had been built over a giant cistern next to the ancient Sassi, the old cave district of Matera. The Sassi district was inhabited from 850 BC. In the 1950s the Italian government branded it vergogna nazionale, meaning national shame, as it became widely known that the residents there lived in appalling conditions with no access to clean water, electricity or sewerage. The Sassi was evacuated and its roughly 20,000 inhabitants were relocated to modern flats in newly built apartment blocks.
The discovery of the magnificent cistern was a shock to many, both inside and outside Italy. But for some Materani, those who grew up in the Sassi and their descendants, it reinforced a view they already held: that before its decline due to poverty, overcrowding and disease, Matera had been a successful and sophisticated community with an impressive underground system for collecting rainwater.
The Sassi was home to a close-knit community of landowners, craftsmen and merchants, and later mainly farmers and livestock breeders, who adapted their lives to this barren, rocky landscape. These stone dwellings were well suited to the cold winters and the very hot summers, while the caves dug into the limestone behind the houses were ideal for storing food, as they kept temperatures constant.
The residents also created a simple yet ingenious system of cisterns carved into the stone, which collected and filtered rainwater. «For a city, access to water from rivers is very important,» says Sabrina Centonze, an architect who specialises in low-environmental-impact housing. «Since there were no rivers in Matera, the inhabitants made use of rainwater and spring water. They collected it in various types of cisterns, each designed for a different purpose.»
Rubbish, waste water and other materials were recycled and reused. The community managed to be largely self-sufficient, growing produce in gardens created on the rooftops of the dwellings or in the countryside around the old stone city.
According to Rita Orlando, an architect who works at the Matera Basilicata 2019 foundation, the residents were mainly vegetarian. «Meat was quite expensive; most people could not afford the cost of it, except on special occasions. Pulses were the main source of protein,» she explains.
The residents maintained a circular, you might say ecological, approach to life. «Materials and objects were repaired and reused many times over and for various purposes,» says Orlando, adding that «there was a strong sense of community based on mutual support.» A good example of how people worked together was a ceremony that took place every August. The residents of the Sassi would cook crapiata, a mixture of assorted legumes and pulses contributed by all the families. «It was a way of not throwing away the unused pulses that were not enough on their own for a single family.»
For these reasons the old stone settlement is often cited by urban-planning experts as an early example of a sustainable and «smart city». And it is also for this reason that in 1993 UNESCO included the Sassi as a World Heritage Site, describing it as «the most remarkable, intact example of a troglodyte settlement in the Mediterranean region, perfectly adapted to the terrain and the ecosystem.»
Today a large part of the Sassi has been turned into luxury boutique cave hotels, modern restaurants, galleries and studios where artists work. Yet the look of the neighbourhood has changed little from how it was before it was abandoned.
To the north and east, beyond the Gravina gorge, stretches a deserted plateau. To the west, honeycomb-like sandstone buildings, Byzantine churches and caves formed the upper part of the old town. A labyrinth of steps and narrow cobbled lanes connected the various levels.
«The roof of one cave is the floor of another,» explains Sabrina Centonze. «This method is called architecture by subtraction, since the construction proceeds by removing material from the earth.»
The cistern uncovered by the collapse of the flower bed mentioned earlier is the Palombaro Lungo, another outstanding example of the ingenuity of the city’s people. The 16th-century cistern, 16 metres deep and fifty metres long, had a capacity of up to 5 million litres of fresh drinking water from the springs.
Another «watery» stop worth making is at the Fontana Ferdinandea, a public fountain at one end of Piazza Veneto. It dates from the Middle Ages and is simple in design, with few embellishments. Like the Palombaro Lungo, its purpose was practical: to provide drinking water to the city’s residents.
Francesco Foschino also spoke to the BBC – a historian and tour guide, as well as the publisher of «Mathera», a history magazine about the city and the region. He says he is troubled by the image that used to surround Matera. When he thinks of the international headlines of the 1950s with titles such as «People still live in caves», he becomes angry. «It’s the word ‘still’ that bothers me. As if they were living the same way cave people lived in the Neolithic era.»
«In Italian, sasso means stone,» says Foschino, «but in Matera Sasso means a neighbourhood of buildings and caves. When locals use the word ‘cave’ they mean the man-made caves, not the natural ones. This creates misunderstandings,» he says, stressing too that the caves were not used for habitation but were dug behind stone buildings as spaces for storing food and for producing olive oil, cheese and wine.
Matera’s decline began in 1806, when the capital of the Basilicata region was moved from there to Potenza. Then, as a result of the Industrial Revolution, the caves – once a source of wealth – became useless. In 1861, with the unification of Italy, the fields belonging to the Italian church were confiscated and the farmers who rented them were forced to move to the Sassi. Since the caves no longer served as food-storage spaces and the farmers needed shelter, the Materani rented the caves out to these families.
Soon the city was suffering from overcrowding. «To create more space in the caves so they could house more residents, people began to dig deeper into the rock, eventually reaching the filtering cisterns,» says Nicoletti. «Inevitably this affected the quality of the water. Sanitary conditions deteriorated, leading to illness and death.»
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