The tower of Chiesa di San Pietro Barisano, set against Sassi de Matera. San Pietro Barisano is the older of Matera’s two Chiesa di San Pietro, which dates to 1000 AD.
An ancient city built vertically on a mountainside with a grand vista for a backdrop, visiting Matera feels like location scouting for the next Indiana Jones movie or Uncharted game.
Matera is a remote town in the mountainous Basilicata region of “The City of Stones,” or Sassi di Matera, has been a city since the Romans founded it in the 8th century AD, but its roots stretch back thousands of years further to the area’s cave dwellings. The Sassi was continuously inhabited until the 1950s when the government evacuated it due to the unhealthy living conditions. It came back into the spotlight in the 1960s when it was used as a filming location for religious epics as the city easily doubled for Biblical Jerusalem, a trend which continues to this day with the Passion of the Christ and the upcoming Ben Hur remake. Today Sassi di Matera has been partially re-inhabited and geared toward tourism but has not lost its historic charm. It was made a UNESCO world heritage site in 1993 and in 2019 it will be a European Capital of Culture.
Standing on its lowest street level felt like being on the floor of a man-made canyon, surrounded by layers of history, houses built into the mountainside and atop each other haphazardly and piece by piece over centuries and by conquers as varied as the Spanish, the Lombards and the Normans with each leaving something of their culture behind. That piece would eventually be modified, or built on top or beside of and so forth. Across the canyon were man-made caves even more ancient than the city and crisscrossed with narrow trails.
The lowest levels were medieval but walking and ascending the main streets or cutting through a maze of stairs and wide piazzas fit between buildings, the ancient was supplanted by the less ancient with one era replacing another until reaching the highest levels which resemble the streets of historic Naples. What makes it really interesting, is that until that plateau is reached much of what I saw was just a façade- those houses were really caves built into the mountainside.
Some of the cave houses have been converted into museums that depict everyday life for the city dwellers. Behind the façade the homes really are just hollowed out caves with nooks for sleeping, cooking and animals.
Visiting Matera on an ITT Tour I got to sleep in a cave hotel, which as primitive as it sounds, is a regular hotel room in a cave. It was very warm inside and I had the best night of sleep I’ve had in ages.
Nestled within its layers, Matera has accumulated many churches and monasteries through the years, none of which look alike. My favorites where San Pietro Caveoso, Nuovo Purgatorio and the Duomo.
I’m pretty certain there’s a law requiring every Italian city to have a St. Peter’s church and Matera has been around long enough to earn two, one for both sections of Matera di Sassi. San Pietro Caveoso was built in1218, but during the Spanish occupation was redone in the Spanish Baroque style. Like many of the churches it is still a functioning church but is open to visitors.
The most interesting church was Nuovo Purgatorio, a church decorated with skeletons and skulls. Built in 1747 by the Confraternity of Poor Souls in Purgatory and local citizens, its theme is death, not as the end, but as the beginning of a new, better life.
The Duomo, the Cathedral of Matera, is currently undergoing renovation, but occupying the highest point in Matera it can be seen from everywhere in the city and is very photogenic. An Apulian-Romanesque church, it was built in 1270 upon the site of a former Benedictine monastery consecrated in 1082.
As well as its landmarks, Matera’s cobbled together nature made every street and building just as fun to shoot. Exploring Matera on a deserted Sunday morning added to the feeling of being in some fantastic fictional setting so I recommend getting an early start when visiting.
