Sassi di Matera

Matera's Sassi are two whole quarters of a town carved into and built out of the soft stone of a ravine. On the slopes of the Gravina, the gorge that cuts into the Murgia plateau, the Sasso Barisano and the Sasso Caveoso spread out on either side of the Civita, a rocky spur crowned by the Romanesque cathedral. Seen from above, the two hollows look like funnels of pale honey-coloured houses stepping down one on top of another, so that a lane is often the roof of the dwelling below. In Carlo Levi's account of his exile in the region, their shape is compared to the way schoolchildren imagine Dante's Inferno; today the same view is one of the most extraordinary townscapes in Europe.

The settlement is one of the oldest continuously used places in Italy. People sheltered in the caves of the gorge in prehistory, Neolithic villages stood on the plateau, and over the centuries the caves were enlarged, closed with built façades and joined by lanes, stairways and channels. The whole quarter worked as a system for gathering rain: water ran along carved gutters into cisterns, some houses had several, and the families of a vicinato shared a courtyard, a well and an oven. Renaissance and Baroque fronts open onto rooms that began as rock-cut cisterns, and beneath the main square lies the Palombaro Lungo, a vast underground reservoir. Scattered through the Sassi and across the gorge are rock churches — Santa Maria de Idris on its crag, Santa Lucia alle Malve, the Madonna delle Virtù with San Nicola dei Greci above it — several still holding medieval frescoes.

The modern history is harsher. By the first half of the 20th century the quarters were overcrowded, with families living alongside their animals in former cisterns, and Levi's book Christ Stopped at Eboli made their poverty a national issue. A special law of 1952 ordered the population to be moved to new districts, and the evacuation lasted into the 1960s, leaving the Sassi almost empty. Restoration began after a further law in 1986; in 1993 UNESCO inscribed the Sassi together with the park of rock churches on the plateau opposite, and in 2019 Matera was a European Capital of Culture. Film-makers have long used the place as a stand-in for ancient Jerusalem, from Pasolini's The Gospel According to St. Matthew to The Passion of the Christ.

The most rewarding way to see it is slowly: walk down from the Piano into either Sasso, visit one of the furnished cave houses that show how families lived before the evacuation, then cross the gorge to the Murgia side and watch the town catch the evening light and, after dark, glow like a nativity scene on the hillside.

Getting there

The Sassi form the old centre of Matera, a few hundred metres from the modern town centre. The nearest airport is Bari Karol Wojtyła International Airport (BRI), about 54 km away. Ferrovie Appulo Lucane trains run from Bari to Matera Centrale, the station closest to the Sassi; the journey takes around an hour and a half. The quarters themselves are a maze of steps and lanes best explored on foot.