Discover the mystery of Matera
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BY CAROL PUCCI / The Seattle Times
MATERA, Italy — Nicola Rizzi stands in front of his boyhood home where chickens and ducks used to wander, closes his eyes and smells bean soup and tomato sauce boiling on pots heated by wood fires. He was 11, a survivor in a neighborhood of windowless caves and damp walls, where animals and humans slept side-by-side and half the children born there died, among them three of his brothers and sisters.
Mostly though, Rizzi remembers the smell of baking bread over olive-wood fires. His father owned a communal oven where people would bring their dough for him to bake into fat loaves big enough to last a week.
“It’s a smell,” says Rizzi, taking a deep breath, “that I still have in my mind.”
It was the smell of home, a home that his family and 17,000 others, mostly poor peasant farmers, were forced by the government to evacuate in the early 1950s after Italian artist and writer Carlo Levi published an account of the squalid living conditions where they lived, not in regular houses, but in thousands-of-years-old cave dwellings called the sassi.
“Christ never came this far, nor did time, nor the individual soul, nor hope,” Levi wrote in “Christ Stopped at Eboli,” a book he authored during his political exile to the rural southern region of Basilicata in the mid-1930s. The title refers to the town of Eboli in neighboring Campania, suggesting that not even Christ could have ventured into an area so desolate as Basilicata, and certainly not to Matera.
“The houses were open on account of the heat, and as I went by I could see into the caves, whose only light came in through the front door. … On the floor lay dogs, sheep, goats and pigs. Most families have just one cave to live in and there they sleep all together; men, women, children and animals.”
Matera, Levi wrote, was a “schoolboy’s idea of Dante’s Inferno.”
In striped vest and bow tie, Agostino Tataranni dispenses some of the best pastries and cappuccino in Italy from behind the bar at Caffe Tripoli on Piazza Vittorio Veneto, Matera’s marbled main square.
Men gather here to talk politics, and couples walk each evening during a community stroll called the passeggiata. There’s a university nearby with a lively arts scene. Elegant baroque-style buildings painted in faded pink and yellow line the streets and squares.
Perched on the edge of a deep ravine, this is modern Matera, a bustling upper town that overlooks the neighborhoods of Sasso Caveoso and Sasso Barisano, the ancient sassi, which are spread out below on the slopes of a deep, rocky ravine.
Dug into the stone cliffs are hundreds of sand-colored caverns carved out of soft volcanic tufa stone, some with built-up brick fronts and elaborate facades and doorways that make them hard to distinguish from ordinary houses.
Layered one on top of the other so that the terraces of some are roofs for others, they’re connected not by real streets but by a maze of winding stone passageways starting a few steps away from the edges of the upper town.
My husband and I drove here from Rome with a hunch that we had arrived in one of the world’s most unusual cities.
We weren’t surprised then that the first person we met was Dorothy Zinn, a social anthropologist from San Antonio.
Abandoned for more than a quarter century after the government relocated the residents to public housing following publication of Levi’s book in 1947, the sassi (Italian for stones) again are drawing attention from writers. This time the stories are focused on the art treasures uncovered in ancient rock churches and the transformation of the caves into luxury hotels, bed and breakfasts, cafes, restaurants and offices for high-tech companies.
Zinn welcomed us to the Locanda di San Martino, a hotel and conference center she and her Italian husband opened three years ago in the sassi after the government offered investors long-term leases and subsidies.
A family of six and one animal lived in what is now the San Martino’s lobby. Chiseled out of stone are 28 rooms on five levels connected to each other by a network of outdoor stone passageways.
An elevator goes to the first two floors, but we climbed the 75 steps to our fifth-floor room. It was a cozy Flintstones-meet-the-future cave with curvy stone ceilings and all the mod-cons, including TV, heat and air conditioning. Three small windows were chiseled out of the bare rock walls, and there were slippers for walking on the bare terra-cotta floors.
Zinn sent us to dinner at a candle-lit cave eatery called La Talpa.
We sat at a table tucked into a stone alcove and ate the local pasta with asparagus and fresh ricotta cheese. Afterward, we climbed the stairs back to our room, listening to church bells ringing and dogs barking, the nighttime sounds of a town where people get around mostly by walking.
Mel Gibson scouted the world for a place that looked like ancient Jerusalem to film “The Passion of the Christ,” and settled on the sassi (recruiting the locals as extras and eating nightly at Antica Trattoria Lucana, where fettuccine alla Mel Gibson is still on the menu).
Locals don’t always agree about the various new uses (the latest addition is a swank wine bar with an 18-hole-putting green in the bottom of a public cistern), but the revival of the sassi has been an economic boost to one of Italy’s poorest regions and transformed the city an Italian prime minister once labeled a national shame.
Life in the caves dates back 9,000 years to prehistoric times, making Matera one of the oldest cities in the world. From the eighth to the 13th century, monks used them as refuges, digging out tiny chapels and elaborate churches, leaving behind delicate frescos.
Later, whole neighborhoods evolved with churches, convents, shops and homes with intricate hydraulic systems to keep the water fresh and cool year-round. Healthy and prosperous, the sassi began to decay as the upper town developed, finally becoming homes for poor peasants who used the churches and other dwellings for homes, barns and stables.
“For two or three centuries, people didn’t realize the value of the place,” says Rizzi, a historian who now heads Circolo La Scaletta, a cultural organization that pushed to have the sassi declared a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1993.
Many, including his father, wanted to see them torn down.
But where others saw abandoned dwellings, Rizzi remembered a community where his family knew their neighbors, not always by name, but by the smell of the one-of-a-kind yeast each used to make their bread.
“The national shame included not only the houses, but also the inhabitants,” he says. Even as an 11-year-old boy, “I started asking myself, why should I be ashamed of where I live?
“Sixty years ago, if you visited, you would have found horses and chickens in here,” says Angelo Tosto, president of Datacontact, the sassi’s largest employer.
With 3,000 people back living in the sassi and property values rising, Tosto is one who is looking ahead more than he’s looking back.
Faced with the need to find new office space for 750 workers in his company’s expanding call-center business, Tosto, whose father was born in the sassi, acquired one of the long-term leases.
He installed 2,800 phone lines and a $3 million computer system in a series of former cave dwellings. Workers sit behind computers pushed up against stone walls as they talk to clients as far away as South America.
Around the corner is the rock church of Madonna delle Virtu, where La Scaletta volunteers discovered rooms filled with 12th-century frescos after clearing out piles of straw. Gibson shot his Last Supper scene here, and community groups use the spaces for modern art and sculpture exhibitions.
In between visits to cave potters and olive-oil tastings, tourists can take a self-guided walking tour of some of the ancient cave churches, among them the ninth-century Madonna de Idris, a giant hilltop rock formation decorated inside with colorful frescos.
Except for the wine bar and putting green, Rizzi says he’s mostly satisfied with what’s become of his old neighborhood and his boyhood home, now offices for a software company.
“We are proud of Matera now,” he says. “The idea is that our roots are more important than building new houses.” As for Carlo Levi’s theory that Christ ignored Basilicata by going no farther than Eboli, the children growing up in Matera in the 21st century have a different perspective.
Tacked to a papier-mache parade float on display in the public library recently was a child’s drawing of a round stone building with a cross planted on top.
“Gesu nasce en una grotta,” the child had written. “Jesus was born in a cave.”
If you go
Where: Matera is in the southern Italian region of Basilicata, between Calabria and Apulia. The city’s population is 60,000, with about 3,000 people living in the sassi.
What to do: Explore the sassi on your own with maps from the tourist office, or on a guided walk.
The tourist office sells tickets for a self-guided tour of a half-dozen or so rock churches in the sassi. More are scattered around in parks in the nearby countryside and can be visited by car.
Matera Turismo (www.materaturismo.it) offers a variety of walking tours and day trips starting at around 30 euro ($40 based on current exchange rates) per person.
Explore the modern upper town for its shops, art galleries and excellent food shops, such as Samuele Olivieri’s Il Buongustaio, which stocks local specialties such as dried red peppers and ear-shaped orecchiette pasta. The local art museum houses some of Carlo Levi’s paintings. Stroll with the locals during the evening passeggiata starting at Piazza Vittorio Veneto. Have a coffee at the Caffe Tripoli, and see photos and news clippings from Mel Gibson’s filming of “The Passion of the Christ.”
Lodging: Locanda di San Martino, Via Fiorentini, 71, in Sasso Barisano. See www.locandadisanmartino.it or call 011-39-0835-25-66-00. Doubles start at $104 with breakfast. La Casa di Lucio, Via San Pietro Caveoso, 66, in Sasso Caveoso. Beautifully restored rooms in former cave dwellings. See www.lacasadilucio.it or call 011-39-0835-31-27-98. Doubles start at $156 with breakfast.
The Matera tourist office, Via de Viti de Marco, 9, in the upper town, has information on inexpensive bed and breakfasts in the sassi.
Restaurants: Eating in any of the cave restaurants is fun, but two restaurants I liked best were in the upper town.
Mel Gibson’s favorite (and mine) was Antica Trattoria Lucana, run by the Sanrocco family for 106 years. Try the orecchiette with ricotta and spinach. Via Lucana, 48. Moderate.
More formal is Lucanerie, a favorite among local gourmets. The nonstop antipasto is a feast of regional delights such as crunchy, dried peppers and slices of sausage with fennel. Reservations. Via Stefano, 61. Expensive.
Traveler’s tip: Call ahead to visit the Dragone Winery a few miles out of Matera, where brothers Michele and Aldo carry on the wine-making started by their great-grandfather in 1882. Ask to see the ninth-century rock church discovered on the property. Locals call it the “Sistine Chapel” of cave churches for its unusual frescos, including one showing Adam and Eve being evicted from Eden. Info at www.dragonevini.it.
More information: Contact the Italian Government Tourist Board at (212) 245-5618 or see www.italiantourism.com.
Bascilicata’s regional tourist agency will mail maps and English brochures; www.aptbasilicata.it.
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