The City Italy Was Ashamed Of

In 1950 the prime minister of Italy stood in the Sassi di Matera, looked at families living in caves alongside their animals, and called it a national disgrace. Two years later parliament passed a law emptying the district by force. Fifteen thousand people were moved to new housing on the plateau above, and the caves they had lived in were sealed.

In 1993 UNESCO inscribed those same caves as a World Heritage Site. In 2019 Matera was European Capital of Culture. Today a night in one of them costs more than a night in most of Rome. Nowhere else in Europe has a place been condemned as unfit for human habitation and then sold back as luxury within a single lifetime, and there are people in Matera who lived through both ends of it.

What the shame was about

The Sassi were not slums that grew. They were a system that stopped working. Caves cut into soft tufa on a ravine wall, connected by a network of cisterns and channels that collected every drop of rain and held it — engineering that let a city exist where there is no river. It supported a few thousand people comfortably.

By the 1940s it held three times that. Malaria was endemic, infant mortality was above forty per cent, and the cisterns that had been the city's genius had become its sewer. Carlo Levi described it in 1945 and Rome read the book as an accusation. The clearance that followed was not cruelty; it was public health policy and it saved lives. It also scattered a community into apartment blocks with no shared courtyards and left a district of empty stone that stayed empty for thirty years.

A place can be uninhabitable because of what has been done to it rather than because of what it is. Matera is the proof, and the proof runs in both directions.

The second emptying

Restoration began in the 1980s under a law granting long leases to anyone who would repair a cave properly. Artists came, then restaurateurs, then hotels. The Sassi filled again — with about three thousand residents, and with visitors who outnumber them many times over on a summer day.

Ask in the upper town and you will hear the complaint now standard across southern Europe: caves that families were moved out of for their own good are rented by the night to people from richer countries, and the grandchildren of those families cannot afford to move back. It is a fair complaint and it is not the whole story. The alternative on offer in 1970 was not a preserved neighbourhood. It was rubble.

How to see it

Two nights, not one. The day trade arrives by coach around eleven and is gone by five; the hours on either side are when the Sassi look like a place rather than a set. Cross the ravine into the Murgia park for the rock churches and the view back — forty minutes on foot, and the vantage every photograph of Matera is taken from.

The Casa Grotta museums are worth the few euros: one furnished cave, bed raised off the floor, mule's stall beside it, which explains the 1952 law faster than any panel of text. Go to one, then walk up to the plateau and look at what people were moved into. Both halves are the story.