Andrew Bain.

Levi’s 1945 book about his exile in southern Italy, Christ Stopped at Eboli. In it, Levi likened the sassi to a ‘‘schoolboy’s idea of Dante’s Inferno’’.

If there’s more fame than shame now in Matera, it’s reflected in the sassi, where more than 2000 people live among the caves again, typically renting them from the government, which owns 70 per cent of the sassi.

At the top of the sassi is Matera’s historic centre, where in the Renaissance, wealthier residents built their mansions and palaces. Known locally as Il Piano because it’s flat, the historic centre is lined with boutique stores and crowned by Matera’s cathedral.

The cathedral recently reopened after 12 years of restoration work, with its sober Renaissance exterior belying a baroque interior that seems excessively florid after the muted tones of the sassi.

Among it all there remain glimpses of Matera’s ghosts. The sassi are broken into two sections, Sasso Barisano and Sasso Caveoso, with most of the restoration taking place in Barisano, leaving the caves of Caveoso sitting as empty eyed as a skull.

Near the cathedral, Casa Noha tells the story of Matera in an excellent 20-minute video, while beneath the prominent Madonna de Idris rock outcrop, Casa Grotta provides a look at a cave furnished as it was in the days of shame.

Back then, up to 11 people lived in a cave, with their animals also inside to provide warmth. There were no toilet facilities, and the city had no water source, so an ingenious system of rainwater channels and cisterns was excavated beneath homes – it was these channels and cisterns, not the city’s history or architecture, that earned Matera a place on Unesco’s World Heritage list in 1993.

Beds sat high off the floor to escape the humidity from the cisterns, and young children often slept in drawers pulled open for the night. Child mortality rates exceeded 50 per cent.

With its limestone cave dwellings dug in the hillside, this is one of the Italian cities that time forgot, says

Step back out of Casa Grotta, into modern Matera, and such history feels impossible in this sassi city that’s now very much a sassy city. – Traveller Andrew Bain travelled courtesy of Hedonistic Hiking.