Overview
Nearly 5 hours south of Rome, in Italy’s instep, sits Matera an ancient city carved from the rock. Matera is the third oldest continuously inhabited city in the world (after Jericho and Aleppo) and the oldest in Europe.
Inhabited since the Paleolithic period, the ancient rock-cut cave dwellings are known as the sassi
Origins
Known to the Greeks and Romans as Lucania, after the Lucani tribe from the 5th century BC. Two centuries later the once prehistoric village became Matheola under Roman rule. Matera transferred into the hands of dominate powers from the Romans to the Byzantine Greeks among others and the city continued to be shaped over the centuries.
1. The Sassi
The Sassi di Matera are not a single building but a continuous architectural fabric of cave dwellings, carved cisterns, rock churches, stairways, and terraces that sit above the Gravina gorge in an unbroken settlement.
The whole system connected by a network of channels, collected rainwater with an efficiency that made the settlement viable.
The UNESCO World Heritage designation in 1993 recognized not just the individual buildings but the Sassi di Matera as an integrated system, a form of settlement that preceded the earliest urban planning seen in ancient Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt by several millennia.
Along with the Sassi, the Rupestrian Churches are also named in the UNESCO World Heritage designation.
2. The Rupestrian Churches
Between the 8th and 13th centuries, Byzantine monks carved more than 150 churches directly into the tufa cliff face of the Gravina gorge. These are not buildings placed against rock, they are buildings that are shaped from the rock.
The Chiesa di Santa Maria de Idris sits inside a rock monolith, its interior decorated with frescoes from the 12th - 17th century, that are faded but still legible.
The Cripta del Peccato Originale, a short drive outside the city, contains 8th century frescoes of such quality and preservation that art historians have called it the Sistine Chapel of Rupestrian art. The frescoes depict scenes from both the Old and New Testaments.
Not part of the set of rock-carved Rupestrian churches but still a beacon of the city is our next building.
3. The Cathedral of Matera
Set atop the two districts of Matera, the Sasso Caveoso and Sasso Barisano, Matera Cathedral reads as a lighthouse above the cave city below. It was built between 1230 and 1270 in the Pugliese-Romanesque style with a facade of pale limestone, a rose window and a bell tower.
Inside, the most significant object is the Madonna della Bruna, a Byzantine icon. After over a decade of renovations, the interior boasts 17th century frescoes and two 12th century frescoed crypts.
Present Day
Even though the Sassi di Matera housed people for millenia, in the 1950s the city became infamous as the ‘Shame of Italy’ due to appalling living conditions in the one room caves. And the cave dwellers were relocated.
After receiving UNESCO status in 1993, Matera gained even more prominence in 2019 by being named a European Capital of Culture.
The city of Matera resembles an ancient holy city and was even used as a background in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ.
Matera has a category of place to stay that exists almost nowhere else in Europe. The converted cave dwelling, the sassi hotel carved into the same rock that has housed human beings since the Palaeolithic era. These are not properties that happen to be near historic architecture. They are the historic architecture. The cisterns that collected Byzantine rainwater are now the vaulted ceilings of hotel rooms.
Staying in the sassi is not proximity to nine thousand years of history. It is sleeping inside them.
Deep Dives
Christ Stopped at Eboli by Carlo Levi — the book that brought global attention to Matera and highlighted the extreme poverty.
The Architecture Atlas Historic Hotel Guide is in progress and coming soon!
Mary
Find me on @_archatlas on Instagram
One of my biggest embarrassments as an Italy lover and long-time resident is that in 20+ years in the country I have never been to Matera! So thanks for making me feel even more embarrassed! Haha.
Good beats — but the thing about Matera that never lets go of me is that it’s a city made by subtraction: you don’t add stone here, you remove it, so the architecture is everything the inhabitants chose not to carve away. Which makes the last seventy years almost too much to hold in one hand. The same rooms were emptied as the “Shame of Italy” in the 1950s, and within a single lifetime we pay to sleep in them as romance. The stone didn’t change and the light didn’t change — what changed was the distance from which people were looking. Which leaves me stuck on a question I can’t settle: is the history of what we call beautiful just the history of who gets to decide? Does staying in the Sassi honour the nine thousand years, or quietly edit out the last seventy?