Sassi di Matera (Matera) Travel Guide - Free

The ravine and plateau around Matera contain evidence of human occupation stretching back to the Palaeolithic period, making the wider landscape one of southern Italy’s important records of early settlement. Natural caves provided shelter, while the Gravina supplied water, grazing land and defensible terrain. Over centuries, inhabitants adapted the rock rather than replacing it, creating chambers, cisterns, terraces and paths. The Sassi’s significance therefore lies not in a single foundation date but in the continuity of occupation and in the way successive communities reshaped the same limestone environment.

From the early medieval period, Basilian monks and other religious communities established hermitages and churches in the rock around the ravine. Between roughly the eighth and thirteenth centuries, rupestrian churches multiplied across the Matera area, often decorated with frescoes and connected by paths through the cave landscape. As Matera expanded, domestic quarters developed around these sacred spaces. Sasso Caveoso retained a particularly rugged relationship with the ravine, while Sasso Barisano became more densely built and commercially connected to the town above.

By the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Sassi housed a large population in compact cave-and-masonry dwellings. Homes, animal shelters, cisterns and workshops commonly shared the same limited spaces, while families depended on agriculture and pastoral activity beyond the town. The district’s physical ingenuity coexisted with severe overcrowding, limited sanitation and poverty. These conditions became central to post-war debates about public health and modernisation, especially after Carlo Levi’s 1945 book Christ Stopped at Eboli drew wider attention to the hardship of rural southern Italy, although its narrative focuses on areas beyond Matera as well as the region’s conditions.

After the Second World War, state policy increasingly regarded the Sassi as unsuitable housing. The 1952 special law for Matera led to the gradual relocation of residents from the cave districts into newly planned neighbourhoods, particularly La Martella and other modern housing areas. The evacuation preserved the Sassi from further overcrowding but also disrupted established social networks and left many homes empty. For several decades the area was treated principally as a symbol of deprivation rather than as a cultural asset.

From the late twentieth century, conservation and rehabilitation changed the Sassi’s public identity. Restoration of cave churches, dwellings and public routes accompanied efforts to return residents and introduce cultural venues, hospitality and small businesses. UNESCO inscribed the Sassi and the Park of the Rupestrian Churches of Matera as a World Heritage site in 1993, recognising the exceptional relationship between settlement and landscape. Matera’s designation as European Capital of Culture in 2019 brought further international attention, while continuing restoration has raised practical questions about tourism, conservation and the affordability of everyday life in the historic quarters.