Sassi di Matera

Put your hand flat against the nearest wall. The stone is soft, almost powdery, and pale like old bread crust. Under your fingertips it may leave a fine golden dust. This is calcarenite, a light limestone that locals call tufo. Almost everything you can see around you was cut from it, or cut into it. Listen for a moment. You may hear footsteps on stairs somewhere above you or below you. Here a staircase is often also someone's roof.

You are standing in the Sassi di Matera, the old cave districts of a hill town in Basilicata, in the instep of southern Italy. The word sassi simply means stones. There are two main districts. Sasso Barisano faces north-west, toward the old road to Bari. Sasso Caveoso faces south, and it is more open and more cave-like. Between them rises the Civita, the high spur of rock where the cathedral stands. Below all three, the ground falls away into a deep ravine called the Gravina.

The first surprise is how many of these buildings are not really buildings at all. Many façades are only fronts. Behind a neat door and a small window, the room continues into the hillside. Some homes go back several chambers into the rock. Builders dug out the soft stone and then used the blocks they removed to build walls and vaults outside. So the town grew in two directions at once — down into the hill, and outward from it.

People have lived on this ravine for thousands of years. Archaeologists have found traces of prehistoric settlement on both sides of the Gravina. Matera is often described as one of the oldest continuously inhabited places in the world. Over the centuries, natural caves became homes, then chapels, then whole streets of houses stacked one above another. The town you see is not one era. It is many eras on top of each other.

Water shaped everything here. This land has long summers and little rain, so every drop counted. Families and communities carved cisterns into the rock, and channels and gutters carried rainwater into them. If you look at the slopes, you can still see small grooves running toward old openings. Under Piazza Vittorio Veneto, in the upper town, lies the Palombaro Lungo — a huge underground cistern that you can visit. Standing inside it feels like standing in a flooded stone cathedral.

And there are real churches in the rock too. Around the Sassi and across the ravine, there are many rupestrian churches — chapels cut directly into the cliff. Some carry faded frescoes of saints, painted in the medieval period. In Sasso Caveoso, look for Santa Maria de Idris, perched on a tall outcrop of rock. From below, it looks like a boulder with a small bell tower. Inside, the walls are the hill itself.

For most of its history, this was a working town. Farmers, shepherds and craftsmen lived here. In many cave homes, a whole family shared one or two rooms with their animals — a mule, a pig, a few chickens. The animals gave warmth in winter, and their manure was valuable. Several small house museums in the Sassi recreate these homes, with the bed raised high, a loom, and a manger right beside it.

By the twentieth century, life here had become very hard. The population grew, but there was little new space. Damp, poor sanitation and disease were common, and child mortality was high. The writer and painter Carlo Levi described this poverty in his book Christ Stopped at Eboli, published after the Second World War. His account shocked readers across Italy. Politicians began to call the Sassi a national shame.

Then came a decision that changed the town. In the early 1950s, the Italian state passed a special law to move residents out of the Sassi. Over the following years, thousands of people were relocated to new housing districts on the plateau. The cave quarters were left largely empty. For a generation, the Sassi stood silent — doors open, roofs grown over with grass. Many Materani felt both relief and loss at the same time.

The second surprise is how completely that story reversed. From the 1980s onward, new laws supported the restoration of the districts. In 1993, UNESCO added the Sassi and the nearby rock churches to its World Heritage List. Slowly, people came back. Today some caves are homes again, and others are hotels, restaurants and workshops. In 2019, Matera served as a European Capital of Culture — the same place once called a national shame.

Filmmakers noticed this landscape long before most tourists did. Pier Paolo Pasolini filmed The Gospel According to Saint Matthew here in the 1960s. Mel Gibson used Matera as Jerusalem for The Passion of the Christ. More recently, a James Bond film, No Time to Die, staged a chase through these lanes. The reason is easy to see. With few modern signs in view, the town can stand in for almost any age.

Now walk toward the edge of the Gravina, if you can. Across the ravine you will see the Murgia plateau, part of a protected park. The cliff face there is full of dark openings — caves and old rock churches. A path leads down to the river and up the far side, but it is steep. From that side, you can look back and see the whole town at once, layered up the slope like a stone honeycomb.

Before you go, stop and look at the lane in front of you. Notice where a roof becomes a path, and where a doorway opens into the hill. Notice the small grooves that once carried rain. Listen to the swallows, and to voices drifting up from a terrace below. This place was carved by hand, one block at a time, over a very long time. As you walk away, let your hand touch the soft stone once more.