Moreover, many bell-shaped cisterns in dug houses were filled up by seepage. Levi painted a vivid portrait of a forgotten rural world that had, since the unification of Italy in 1870, sunk into a desperate poverty. Ponte, who grew up in the modern part of Matera, which sprawls along the Piano (the “flat”) above the ravine, was one of the first to take advantage of this ready-made real estate. or It’s a form of gentrification, but it doesn’t quite fit the model, since the Sassi were already empty, and nobody is being displaced.” Today, around 3,000 people live in the Sassi and about half of the dwellings are occupied, with Matera firmly on southern Italy’s tourist circuit. When I spotted the stone facade of a church in the wilderness, it looked like a mirage: Etched into the raw flanks of a cliff, it could only be reached by scrambling across pebbles as slippery as ball bearings. Many of the frescoes were painted by anonymous, self-taught monks. A third hypothesis says that the name comes from the colour of the Virgin's face. Vezi și. This makes it potentially one of the oldest continually inhabited settlements in the world. Because of the ancient primeval-looking scenery in and around the Sassi, it has been used by filmmakers as the setting for ancient Jerusalem. In 1993, Unesco listed the Sassi as a World Heritage site, calling it “the most outstanding, intact example of a troglodyte settlement in the Mediterranean region, perfectly adapted to its terrain and ecosystem.”. The main altar and the interior frescoes were cleaned, and missing pieces of moldings, reliefs, and other adornments were reconstructed from photographic archives or surrounding fragments.[9]. “Matera is one of the oldest living cities in the world in terms of continuity,” Antonio Nicoletti, an urban planner from Matera, told me. The family had had no news of him for two years. “Matera is a model for making use of the past without being overwhelmed by it,” says American-born novelist Elizabeth Jennings, who has lived here for 15 years. Matera is connected to the A14 Bologna-Taranto motorway through the SS99 national road. The decoration is mainly from the 18th century Baroque restoration, but recently[when?] Mangia!” he insisted. In southern Italy, the past has often helped rescue the present. |, (Inside one of Matera’s rupestrian churches, frescoes from the ninth century A.D. on the walls of the Crypt of Original Sin depict scenes from the Old and New Testaments. “It became a city of ghosts.” Some Materan officials suggested that the whole district be walled up and forgotten. And the ancient rural culture is surprisingly resilient. The Tramontano Castle, begun in the early 16th century by Gian Carlo Tramontano, Count of Matera, is probably the only other structure that is above ground of any great significance outside the sassi. In 2019, Matera was declared a European Capital of Culture. “Back then, the Sassi had been abandoned, virtually given over to wolves.”. We knew every family.”, “My father has some very black memories of the Sassi,” Antonio added. The container was closed with a wheat dough before being placed on low fire powered with the charcoal. There was nothing but poverty and exploitation. There are many other churches and monasteries dating back throughout the history of the Christian church. (One of his earliest memories was his father’s return to Matera after migrating to Germany to become a laborer. “They had been filled with debris.” The cisterns are now being turned into a “soul spa” for meditation. In the icy interior, light filtering through a collapse in the ceiling revealed the faded remains of frescoes on the scarred walls. It was delicate, closer to cream than cheese. The Sassi are habitations dug into the calcareous rock itself, which is characteristic of Basilicata and Apulia. California Do Not Sell My Info Han er hovudstad i provinsen Matera i regionen Basilicata og har om lag 60 000 innbyggjarar. “We were a tight group of friends, men and women, medical students, law students, housewives—and not a single trained archaeologist among us.” The members began exploring the desolate Sassi, which were by then becoming overgrown and dangerous, and realized that the cave dwellings’ reputation was misleading. Evacuated in 1952, the population was relocated to modern housing, and the Sassi (Italian for "stones") lay abandoned until the 1980s. Much of the unique architecture, the group discovered, could easily be saved. Saskatchewan had the highest population of Matera families in 1911. Municipality: Matera", "Recasting Materan Identity: The Warring And Melding Of Political Ideologies Carved In Stone", World Monuments Fund – Rupestrian Churches of Puglia and the City of Matera, "Robin Schulz "Sun Goes Down" (Lilja, dir. In 1514, however, the population rebelled against the oppression and killed Count Giovanni Carlo Tramontano. Ponte opened the smoked-glass door to what was to be my own rock-hewn refuge, one of five rooms dug into the soft limestone off a small courtyard. Along with cave hotels, there are now cave restaurants, cave cafés, cave galleries and cave clubs. Another hypothesis is that the name comes from herbon, a city of Giudea, where the Virgin went to visit her cousin Elisabetta. "[7] In the 7th and 8th centuries the nearby grottos were colonised by both Benedictine and Basilian monastic institutions. “But he also has a nostalgia for its social life. He suddenly stopped next to a fractured staircase: “There used to be a well here, where I’d get the water as a little boy,” he said, visibly shaken. Matera Cathedral (1268–1270) has been dedicated to Santa Maria della Bruna since 1389. Working on their caves—which gives new meaning to the term “fixer-upper”—the Pontes discovered eight interconnected cisterns below the floor, part of a network developed to catch rainwater for drinking. Today, carved stone stairways still connect arches, attics, belfries and balconies, each grafted onto the other like a dynamic Cubist sculpture. When she arrived to the periphery of the city, she got off the wagon and asked farmer to take her message to the bishop. As the capital of the province of Matera, its original settlement lies in two canyons carved by the Gravina River. After a short communal phase and a series of pestilences and earthquakes, the city became an Aragonese possession in the 15th century, and was given in fief to the barons of the Tramontano family. Today, these underground residences are being reinhabited by Italians, and staying in one of the Sassi’s cave hotels has become one of Europe’s most exotic new experiences. The first government archaeologists arrived in the early 1980s. It was a Sunday, and the extended family was fresh from church service, crisply dressed and chatting excitedly over potent espressos. Matera (Italian pronunciation: [maˈtɛːra], locally [maˈteːra] (listen); Materano: Matàrë [maˈtæːrə]) is a city in the region of Basilicata, in Southern Italy. He moved nearby with his wife around 1990, and has been renovating the compact complex, with five cave-rooms and a dining hall around a courtyard, ever since, installing plumbing, electricity, heating and ventilation systems to counter the subterranean humidity. However, the construction remained unfinished after his assassination in the popular riot of 29 December 1514. They then destroyed the wagon to keep the Saracens from taking the painting. As the ripe cloud of steam hung in the room, he scooped out a scalding sample and offered it to me. We’ve achieved our goal.” The biggest challenge, he says, is to ensure that the Sassi develop as a living community rather than a tourist enclave. A couple of days later, I got my answer. “Mangia! “I ran up to hug him and nearly knocked him over!”), Later, as we dried out in a warm café, Signor Nicoletti said that he had been glad to see his old home again, but was in no hurry to go back. Located in the instep of the Italian boot, the town has always been an isolated, forgotten part of Basilicata, among the least populated, least visited and least understood regions of Italy. “It must have been like finding a five-star hotel, without the padrone!” He and friends first moved in as squatters in the 1970s, and today, the complex, abstract shapes of the Sassi are echoed in his paintings. “Yesterday’s ricotta is tomorrow’s butter,” Piero said, as if it were an alchemist’s secret. Give a Gift. So the statue of Madonna entered in the city on a triumphal wagon. In the 1950s, the entire population of roughly 16,000 people, mostly peasants and farmers, were relocated from the Sassi to new housing projects in an ill-conceived government program, leaving it an empty shell. Later the meat was cut and so ready to be cooked. Matera’s obscurity ended in 1945, when the Italian artist and author Carlo Levi published his memoir Christ Stopped at Eboli, about his year of political exile in Basilicata under the Fascists. The town of Matera was founded by the Roman Lucius Caecilius Metellus in 251 BC who called it Matheola. Ever since the excavation of Pompeii brought grand tours to Naples in the 18th century, historical sites have lured foreign travelers to impoverished outposts. “But I was overwhelmed by what I found! After a visit in 1950, Italian Prime Minister Alcide De Gasperi was so appalled that he set in motion a draconian plan to relocate the Sassi’s entire population to new housing developments. In 1959, at age 23, De Ruggieri and his older brother founded a cultural club to salvage Matera’s past, called the Circolo la Scaletta, the Circle of Stairs. The new public houses were designed by Italy’s most avant-garde architects, in a misguided utopian vision that would actually isolate families in dismal, claustrophobic boxes. “We asked ourselves a simple question: Who are we?” recalls one of the leaders, Raffaello De Ruggieri, today. Matera preserves a large and diverse collection of buildings related to the Christian faith, including a large number of rupestrian churches carved from the calcarenite rock of the region. (Being a troglodyte, as locals cheerfully refer to themselves—the word’s literal meaning is “cave dweller”—evidently doesn’t preclude being stylish.) Levi singled out the Sassi for their “tragic beauty” and hallucinogenic aura of decay—“like a schoolboy’s idea of Dante’s Inferno,” he wrote. The book’s title, referring to the town of Eboli near Naples, suggested that Christianity and civilization had never reached the deep south, leaving it a pagan, lawless land, riddled with ancient superstitions, where some shepherds were still believed to commune with wolves. Keep up-to-date on: © 2020 Smithsonian Magazine. Instead, the ancient laneways became overgrown and decrepit, and the Sassi soon gained a reputation for crime, attracting drug dealers, thieves and smugglers. Balls of his prized caciocavallo podolico hung from the rafters, and a small dog darted about the disordered room yapping at our ankles. At the same time, the Sassi’s former inhabitants had difficulty adjusting to their new lodgings. The ancient town grew up on one slope of the rocky ravine created by a river that is now a small stream, and this ravine is known locally as "la Gravina". At the slightest prompting, they took turns regaling us with their childhood memories of “troglodyte life” in the Sassi, including how to wash laundry using ash and how many goats they could squeeze into their homes. Known as la città sotterranea ("the underground city"), the Sassi and the park of the Rupestrian Churches were named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1993. The nearest airport is Bari Airport. Some are simple caves with a single altar and maybe a fresco, often located on the opposite side of the ravine. Because the sheep weighed about 8–10 kg., when they cooked it they invited all the neighbours and they enjoyed dance, music and wine. The rough walls were now whitewashed with lime to seal the rock, but the layout was unchanged. Over the course of its history, Matera has been occupied by Greeks, Romans, Longobards, Byzantines, Saracens, Swabians, Angevins, Aragonese, and Bourbons. Touted as the thing you absolutely must do before visiting the Sassi of Matera (literally meaning stone, but best translated as 'districts'), distracted by a beautiful hot day and an ice-cold beer in Piazzetta Giovanni Pascoli, we somehow managed to miss this - having read more since, it's the one thing we regret from our brief time in Matera. On 17 October 2014, Matera was declared European Capital of Culture for 2019, together with Bulgaria's second-largest city, Plovdiv. Byen ligg på tvers av ein liten, trong dal, som har vorte erodert av elva Gravina, som renn gjennom byen. “Now they’re celebrities.”. Today there are many thriving businesses, pubs and hotels there, and the city is amongst the fastest growing in southern Italy. The interior is on the Latin cross plan, with a nave and two aisles. Get the best of Smithsonian magazine by email. The Matera family name was found in the USA, Canada, and Scotland between 1861 and 1920. It has three large towers, while twelve were probably included in the original design. The bishop, the clergy and the folk rushed to receive the Virgin, but they found a statue. Here, they never had a golden age. “In the next few years, the Sassi were emptied,” says Nicoletti. With its solid pillars carved from the rock and a vault height of more than fifteen metres, it is a veritable water cathedral, which is navigable by boat. “Rather than being put in mothballs, the Sassi are becoming dramatically different to what they once were. Matera er ein by sør i Italia. But why did the government focus on the failures of the last 100 years, and forget that the Sassi had thrived for the previous 9,000?” De Ruggieri asks. “Are we the children of misery and poverty, as the government was telling us, or are we the descendants of a long, proud history?”, I met De Ruggieri, now a retired lawyer in his 70s, relaxing with his wife on the garden terrace of their renovated mansion in the Sassi, eating cherries in the sunshine. [12], The origins of the festival are not well known, because its story has changed while being handed down from generation to generation. The town’s prehistoric cave dwellings had by then become “dark holes” riddled with filth and disease, where barnyard animals were kept in dank corners, chickens ran across the dining room tables, and infant mortality rates were horrendous, thanks to rampant malaria, trachoma and dysentery. La Scaletta published its own book on the cave churches in 1966, and began lobbying for conservation funds, supported by the writer Carlo Levi, now a senator, who declared the Sassi to be an architectural treasure “on a par with the Grand Canal of Venice.” In the late 1970s, De Ruggieri purchased a ruined mansion on the fringe of the Sassi—“for the price of a cappuccino!” he jokes—and began restoring it, despite fears that it was dangerous. Things to do in Matera Gain an insight at Casa Noha. A leather-skinned shepherd wielding a wooden crook was driving podolico cattle to pasture with a phalanx of dogs. San Pietro Barisano was recently restored in a project by the World Monuments Fund, funded by American Express. Some are complex cave networks with large underground chambers, thought to have been used for meditation by the rupestrian and cenobitic monks. The crapiata is an old recipe hailing from Matera dating to the Roman period. But he didn’t think it was news. The profane insertions such as the navalis wagon and its violent destruction, along with the intimacy and the religious solemnity, suggest this festival shares roots with ancient traditions of other Mediterranean countries. “To me, it was shocking: I might have had three uncles! : Che, Fidel and the Improbable Revolution that Changed World History, The Naked Olympics: The True Story of the Ancient Games, Napoleon's Privates: 2500 Years of History Unzipped, Medicinal Plant May Have Evolved Camouflage to Evade Humans, Melting Ice in Norway Reveals Ancient Arrows, The Ten Best STEM Toys to Give as Gifts in 2020.

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