The Oldest Inhabited Cave-City in Europe: Matera, Italy

Modern Life in a Cave: The Sassi of Matera

We are now visiting a very unusual place, located on the instep of Italy's boot. 

Matera is the name of this very unusual city in Basilicata (Lucania), Italy.  It is thought to be the oldest continuously-inhabited settlement in Europe (over 9,000 years). It also had the distinction of being one of the most deprived and impoverished areas in Italy until the latter part of the 20th century. 

looking across gorge from Sassi, Matera (Janet Strayer close-up photo zoom)

The oldest, perhaps most interesting part of Matera contains the Sassi (the Rocks), two areas along a precipice deposited on either side of a deep gorge. This area of highly porous limestone resulted in many caves and houses dug into the precipices. It is the ancient and continuous habitation of these caves and dwellings in the Sassi that finally put Matera on the modern map. It is now a designated UNESCO site (click link for what we missed).

Bad Weather

We picked a bad time to go to Matera. But it was the time we had free, and we'd made reservations online (non-refundable).  The weather wasn't too bad when we left our comfy place in Lecce: just overcast and drizzling. Basilicata province borders Lecce in Puglia, so how much worse could it get? No big deal. But the drizzling rain turned  to big, wet smudges of snow on the windshield as we neared Matera. In fact, we'd picked one of the worst times to travel. Today's headline (Feb. 26 as I write in Matera) from The Guardian International Edition reads:"Beast from the east' brings snow and frosty weather across Europe: Schools closed and transport disrupted as temperatures plunge across continent" 

The Travelling Attitude: Weather the Storm!

The worst time ever to travel! As seasoned travellers, though, we thought we could weather the storm. Part of the art of travelling is an optimistic, exploratory mindset without too many expectations. I think this is because you have to keep going, in any case; so you lower the bar of your expectations or you reframe them. That meant we were NOT ging to take the tour we'd wanted up and down and in and out of the many caves in what's known as the Sassi districts, and we were not going to see the famed Byzantine-frescoed cave sites scattered throughout the precipices forming the Sassi. But at least we were going to see a possibly more "genuine" Matera in all its cold and wet and grey reality. We would experience a very small bit of what the winter (one day of it, anyway) was like for those who had lived here year round ... and under much worse conditions than a pre-heated hotel room! So, with our re-booted expectations held firmly much lower than we'd originally hoped, we travelled onward.

A few kilometers before we reached Matera, we saw some strange out-croppings of eroded rocks and barren land that could be imagined as moonscapes. It had a very harsh attraction, even (or especially) on this overcast day that blocked out sky and sun. But, like other travellers, we were intent upon having our modern troglodyte experience.

Many years ago, we'd been to Cappadocia in Turkey, a similarly eroded landscape that also had archaeological traces of  Neolithic cave settlement (but were no longer lived-in). It also contained interesting frescoes tucked into oddly shaped caves in the rocks. But that was in the light of the sun. We'd even bathed our feet in thermal springs there. 

Sassi, Matera (Janet Strayer photo, Feb 26, 2018)

No such luck here and now. It was bleak when we got to Matera.The temperature was about -5 C. It felt even colder walking around the Sassi. The wind blew smacks of wet snow at us. All around us was cold stone and highly porous  rock. There was nowhere to go. Nearly everything was sensibly closed. Only a handful of  bundled-up people were visible, all of us taking photos with gloves on. This could get claustrophobic, I thought,  as I had to watch my steps along the very slippery stone pavements and steps along the rockface. Everything in stone and everything leading to more stone strata , now with houses (once caves) tucked into the porous rocks. Looking down, more stone precipice. 

 

This worn and harsh terrain is the landscape used for biblical dramas like Pasolini's The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) and  Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ (2004), as well as the Amazon's city in Patty Jenkins' Wonder Woman (2017). There is something other-worldly in its severity and lack of softness. Many have  taken what shelter they could in its many caves. And some have been exiled  here.

Carlo Levi, self portrait (part of painting)

This area became home to Carlo Levi, the Italian doctor, painter, writer (Christ Stopped At Eboli), and activist who was exiled near here as a Jewish and anti-Fascist political prisoner. Levi's penetrating description of the daily hardships and deplorable conditions experienced by the often starving, malaria-infested, and stalwart people who endured in this region helped to propel the inequities of Italy's southern regions to national and international attention after WW II. He likened the rock-faced, funnel-like Sassi of Matera to the imagined landscape of Dante's hell. 

the day before the snow hit hard: a piazza in the Sassi, photo by Janet Strayer

Matera now is nothing like the rawness of Levi's description. But neither is it a gentrified place.

night in the Sassi before the snowfall, from screened window in our room, Janet Strayer photo

It seems still to be evolving, with greater cross-Italian and international interest, re-settlement, improved housing conditions and hotels, as well as re-vitalized communities. The once disgraceful state of living conditions here have now been converted into a unique heritage site for the world to see. The New Yorker published an interesting article in 2015 about Matera from the perspective of its locals past and present. As it always does, progress has come at the price of loss.

A national embarrassment, the Italian government in the 1950's forcibly relocated Matera's cave inhabitants to more modern quarters, a move that lacerated their local culture while aimed at improving conditions.

Cathedral atop Sassi precipice in Matera (Janet Strayer photo)

Subsequently, people, including those with means, started moving back into the Sassi, renovating it, and now the European Union supports it with investment and tourism. This remains a site that, in the midst of improvements, well remembers its recent past, visible in historical records and videos, and always in the landscape itself. It is a place worth knowing, but it is not a pleasant place in my regard. You'll read why as events continue. 

ceiling of our room in Sassi of Matera, Janet Strayer photo

We'll remember our visit for several reasons.The night we slept in the Sassi, we felt the coldness of the place, its unforgiving harshness, its stories, its ghosts. The wet snow that greeted our arrival turned overnight into a steady accumulated snowfall. The power went out in our room (we were the only guests). The caretaker served breakfast the next morning and told us to get on the move pronto, before they closed the roads. Trouble was, I felt awful. I'd hit my head at night, without remembering it, and the pillow was bleeding. I'd probably had a concussion and my head ached fiercely. No vehicles could come get us here. We'd have to walk in the snow to a main piazza, and maybe there we could find a cab to take us to the covered lot where we'd left our car before entering the Stassi.  Not on our life. And that's what seemed at stake. Forget about the famed cave-religious paintings which we never got to see. 

Backback and bag in tow, we did our best. Me, with toilet tissue inside my hat that padded my bloody head, and with a stick (a mop handle) I'd taken from the courtyard to help me balance. My partner carried most of our load in his backback. I could barely walk but was highly motivated to get the hell out!

We couldn't find the piazza, having taken one of the many possible wrong turns in the Sassi. We slipped and fell on the slick and slanted stone walks,  snow falling in our eyes. We knew we couldn't be far from the piazza, but we also knew by now that there would be no cabs. They were suddenly part of another world. There was nothing I wanted more right then than to get out of this god-forsaken stone maze. Dante's hell came to my mind... just as it had to Carlo Levi.

We trod down another dispirited route, weary and sore, as a truck was inching its way down the road. Angels picked us up. They were stone-masons who'd been working inside the Cathedral and were going home to their nearby town before the roads officially closed. They didn't know Matera, but did their best to drive us to the parking lot where our car might be. Mercy.

It was the wrong parking lot. And it took us even further away from where we'd parked. We discovered this as we wandered around looking for our car. A woman noticed we'd been circling the lot on foot several times. We'd thought this was the only covered parking lot in Matera, but she told us there was another. It was much too far to walk, especially under present conditions. She resolutely escorted us to the police, located on an upper floor of the parking lot, telling us, in as much Italian dialect as we could understand, that this was absolutely what must be done to get us out of here. 

So there we sat in the police station hallway for several hours. At least we were out of the snow and could drink some water. A female officer told me I should go to the hospital, seeing my blood-matted hair (I'd tried to clean it, but the wound kept opening and hurt to touch). Nope, all I wanted was get out of Madera, thanks. No police cars available. All roads were a mess. We waited, limp in the corridor, deciding that our fate was sealed: we'd have to spend a wretched night in any place that would give us a room, even in the pokey. Several hours later, one very, very kind and competent officer told us he'd managed to order a police car from somewhere. He and his partner drove us through chaotic streets to our car. Mercy again.

We made it out, slowly inching our way among the other cars to the highway.  We followed a van of prison-inmates. It was a rough drive out, but here we are. And now it has become our own true story of a winter night in Matera.  How happy and grateful  to have survived this particular adventure. 

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Regards, Janet @ https://www.janetstrayer.com