Italy’s 9000-year-old city
Trip notes
Time should tick slowly in a city like Matera. Claimed as the third-oldest continually inhabited settlement in the world (after Aleppo and Jericho), the southern Italian city has been home to someone for at least 9000 years. But by any standards, the last 70 years in Matera have been a whirlwind.
In 1950, the impoverished city was declared the ‘‘shame of Italy’’ by the country’s prime minister of the day, a pronouncement that culminated in the eviction of 15,000 residents living in the caves that punctured a deep ravine running through the city.
Today, Matera is a place reborn. Its caves are filled with restaurants, bars, hotels and souvenir stores, and the city is a Hollywood darling. In 2019, it will take centre stage as Europe’s Capital of Culture.
What stands Matera apart for visitors are the cave regions, or sassi (meaning ‘‘stone’’ in Italian), that line the ravine – up higher, on the plateau, the modern city barely gets a passing glimpse. Thousands of caves perforate the hard stone, climbing up the slopes of the ravine so that one cave’s ceiling is often the next cave’s floor.
Stone-brick facades provide a visual semblance of civilisation, but as you wander the narrow lanes that run higgledy-piggledy courses through the caves, you are inevitably walking over the roofs of the homes. Chimneys erupt from the cobblestones, and it’s a stroll through what half-resembles a raw, landlocked Santorini.
The best walks here are the aimless ones – up alleys, down lanes – threading among the homes and Matera’s 155 cave churches, which were mostly built in the 11th and 12th centuries and now deconsecrated.
At times it seems there are almost as many lookouts as churches in the sassi. Come to any edge and there’s inevitably a ‘‘belvedere’’ peering out over the deep ravine and the sassi. View it like this, as a puzzle of stone houses on stone slopes, and it’s easy to see why filmmakers have adopted Matera as the body double of choice for Biblical-era cities.
In the 1960s, Pier Paolo Pasolini shot The Gospel According to St Matthew in the then-forlorn city; in 2004, it was Mel Gibson with The Passion of the Christ. In 2015, the new Ben Hur rolled through Matera, and Gibson will be back in 2017 filming a sequel to The Passion.
It’s a long way from the time when Matera’s sole appearance in popular culture was in Carlo