The Sassi of Matera

There are two Sassi, the Barisano and the Caveoso, divided by the spur of rock carrying the Civita and the cathedral. They are not an ordinary old town with a few caves in it: they are caves that over time acquired a facade. The house is the cavity; what you see from outside is only the part built afterwards. The roof of one dwelling is often the street of the one above, which explains why you get lost in the Sassi even with a map.

The clearance

In the 1940s the Sassi were an overcrowded district with no running water and no sewers, where families shared the cave with their animals and infant mortality was extremely high. After Carlo Levi's book it became a national scandal, and in 1952 a special law ordered the clearance: some fifteen thousand people were moved to villages and districts built for the purpose higher up.

The Sassi stood empty for decades, and for decades they were treated as a shame to be forgotten. The change of mind came in the 1980s with a new law for their recovery, and in 1993 UNESCO added them to the World Heritage list. People live there again now, and the hard part is stopping them from turning into nothing but hotels.

What to see inside

The rock churches are what surprises most: hollowed out of the tuff, with apses and columns made by taking stone away instead of putting it up, and in many of them the Byzantine frescoes are still readable. The Casa Grotta is a house furnished as it was before the clearance, with the high bed, the loom and the stable in the same room: ten minutes inside explain more than a museum.

Under the main square lies the palombaro lungo, a cistern cut into the rock some fifteen metres deep, plastered to hold water and forgotten until the 1990s. You walk through it on gangways, and your voice echoes.

From the other side of the Gravina

The place from which the Sassi really make sense is not inside the Sassi: it is on the opposite side of the Gravina, in the Murgia Materana park. From there you see the whole city clinging to the wall, and you understand that it was not built on a hill but inside a canyon. It is twenty minutes by car, or on foot down to the bottom of the gorge and up the other side, with the suspended footbridge as the link.

It was not built on a hill: it was carved inside a canyon.

The view from the Murgia