The entrance of the breakfast room at Sextantio le Grotta della Civita in Matera, Italy.
Matera rises up on both sides of a deep ravine, its houses carved out of pale limestone, one piled on top of the other, forming a dazzling beehive of humanity. Known as the ‘City of Stones’, Matera was one of Italy’s first settlements, said to be the third-oldest continually inhabited city in the world, and its layers reveal Palaeolithic, Gothic, Byzantine, Saracen, Norman and Aragonese civilisations, as well as a number of spectacular rupestrian churches from as early as the 8th century AD.
Yet for centuries, Matera was shunned by the rest of Italy — shamed by the abject poverty of its inhabitants, most of whom led a taxing agricultural existence, crowded into tiny cave-like dwellings with dozens of family members. In the 1950s, many of the residents were relocated to new housing developments outside the Sassi, or old part of the city, leaving the cave houses to fall further into ruin.
In 1993, UNESCO named the Sassi and the rupestrian churches of Matera as World Heritage sites, and the ensuing transformation has been astonishing. Matera has come back to life, home to a nouvelle vague of young, international creatives and their multitude of activities and startups.
It is a European capital of culture for 2019, an accolade that was unimaginable two decades ago. Matera’s ancient streetscapes have found fame in such movies as Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel
According to St Matthew (1964), Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004), and Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman (2017). Tourists are now lured away from other southern Italian hotspots like neighbouring Puglia to climb Matera’s zigzagging stone staircases and visit its sprawling cave churches, a 13th-century cathedral and a castle that dates back to the 15th century, and explore the amazing network of cisterns that kept water flowing to this dry but breathtaking landscape. ››