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| view of Matera's Sassi district |
Italian lore says Matera is the third oldest city in the world, though a google search doesn’t list it in the top 10 oldest cities, so it probably depends on how you decide what constituted the “first inhabited” city. Nevertheless, Matera is probably the oldest city in Europe (though residents of Plovdiv, Bulgaria, lay claim to that honor also), a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a spectacular place to visit.
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| photo of donkey next to bed in cave |
Early inhabitants carved cave homes out of the soft limestone rock along the upper edges of the gorge that marks the first settling of Matera. People lived in those caves until the 1950’s, with no electricity, running water or sanitation. Their animals lived inside the small, dank homes with them. The stable and “manure room” (just what it says it is) were part of the bedroom/living area/kitchen. I took a photo of a human/donkey photo in the cave home we visited.
Residents of Matera were poor farmers who used animals for work and transport, but rarely for food. An animal was so valuable that, upon its death, every part of it was used, including its bones as supports for roof tiles in this house.
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| animal bones supporting roof tiles |
Residents used chamber pots for toilets, pouring the
contents into open channels running alongside the cobbled streets, which, along
with the intimate presence of animals and animal waste in the caves, made the
entire area extremely unhealthy, especially for children. Child mortality was very high, even into the
1950’s.
The Sassi, as this part of Matera is known, became the “shame
of Italy” in the 1950’s, so the government built housing for the 18,000
residents and moved them, willingly and unwillingly, to the new apartments with
power, water and toilets in exchange for their cave dwellings. Now, the caves are owned by the government
and mostly uninhabited.
You can get a 99 year lease on a cave and restore it at great cost, so most of the restoration, which is strictly controlled to preserve the structures and history, has gone into hotels, restaurants, and B and B’s. You have to use natural materials in restoring buildings, so, for example, you’ll see clay pipes outside homes rather than plastic or metal pipes.
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| clay drains in restored house |
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| Matera from the gorge |
We stayed in a lovely cave hotel overlooking the gorge
where the city started, but you do have to navigate lots of steps to get to
your cave room or to the breakfast room located in the ancient cave church.
Our guide described the architecture as “negative/positive”. The negative space is the cave, with the rock carved out to make or enlarge the cave. The positive space is the blocks of rock carved from the cave debris that formed inside and outside walls in many of the caves, or the rock left standing inside the cave as in the pillars of the cave churches.
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| 13th century church door |
Like most Italian cities, Matera is full of churches, at
least half of them unused or reused for some other purpose. Some have beautiful frescoes; several have multiple layers of frescoes. As the
paintings became dark or damaged, artisans put on a new layer of plaster over
them and painted images on the new layer.
Several churches had 3 layers of frescoes. In one church, you can see a saint’s head
high up on the wall, with 2 more layers of frescoes below the head. You’re not supposed to hide or damage a
saint’s head, if possible, so artists tried to find ways to preserve them.
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| frieze of purgatory on Purgatory Church |
Medieval Catholicism made a point of terrifying people into good behavior. This frieze of Purgatory is on the front of a church named “Purgatory”. It features suffering skeletons and some poor soul burning in Hell. We visited the painted churches of Romania last year to see their exterior walls covered with magnificently colorful paintings of all the horrible things that happen to miscreants. The paintings are on the outside so that the scores of peasants who couldn’t get inside the church during a service would still be able to see the terrors that awaited them if they misbehaved.
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| icon in building wall |
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