“Anyone from Jesus to James Bond has been seen in the UNESCO heritage site (of Matera)” said the sub-heading to a Guardian article about this hill town a couple of years ago. I knew about James Bond—Matera was one of the locations for ‘No Time to Die’—but I was intrigued by the reference to Jesus. It turns out that Pier Paolo Passolini’s ‘The Gospel According to St. Matthew’ was also filmed here.
The Guardian did not mention me or my wife, but we have also been there. Not to make a movie, but as part of one of our road trips through Southern Italy.
To say that Matera is an unusual place is a bit of an understatement. You will not find a city like it anywhere else.
The feature which makes Matera so distinctive is linked to the limestone cliffs on which it sits. The soft stone allowed dwellings to be cut from the rocks with relative ease and the city effectively developed out of a network of troglodyte caves. That in itself is not unique. However, whilst in other places the inhabitants eventually abandoned their caves for masonry buildings, in Matera the poorer sections of the population continued to live in caves well into the second half of the 20th century. In some cases the caves had small masonry constructions added to them, but essentially the poor remained cave dwellers.
The two photos below provide examples of their homes.
There are two separate districts of Matera that consist almost entirely of cave dwellings. They are collectively known as the ‘Sassi’ (a term derived from the Latin word for ‘stone’ or ‘rock’)—a name once synonymous with areas of extreme poverty in which diseases like malaria and cholera were rife. In the 1950s the Italian government forced most of the residents of the Sassi out of their homes and relocated them to other parts of the city.
In an extraordinary turn-around, this history of poverty and squalor is a key element in Matera’s re-birth as a very special tourist attraction. In the 1980s the government started to encourage artisans to move into the abandoned Sassi and also initiated a programme of financial support for the refurbishment of the old dwellings.
Many of the caves were turned into quirky B&Bs or small guesthouses. We actually rented a little two-storey cave house for a couple of days and absolutely loved both the accommodation and the atmosphere in the district.
There are wonderful views of the city from the surrounding hills.
You can only explore Matera on foot. It is virtually impossible to use a car on the narrow lanes and parking is an issue in any case—so if you are hiring a car to come here, do not choose a big one! (The small ones are cheaper anyway.)
Fascinating!