As we all descended the slippery steps, a fine drizzle shrouded the stone laneways in a haunting mist, and Signor Nicoletti gazed around the Sassi with increasing agitation. California Do Not Sell My Info But he didn’t think it was news. The town of Matera was founded by the Roman Lucius Caecilius Metellus in 251 BC who called it Matheola. He pretended to clean his glasses as tears welled up in his eyes. 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The crapiata is a simple dish of water, chickpeas, beans, wheat, lentils, potatoes and salt. Today, these underground residences are being reinhabited by Italians, and staying in one of the Sassi’s cave hotels has become one of Europe’s most exotic new experiences. Moreover, many bell-shaped cisterns in dug houses were filled up by seepage. “Are we the children of misery and poverty, as the government was telling us, or are we the descendants of a long, proud history?”, I met De Ruggieri, now a retired lawyer in his 70s, relaxing with his wife on the garden terrace of their renovated mansion in the Sassi, eating cherries in the sunshine. One cave complex is occupied by a computer software company with nearly 50 employees. Where else can you now sleep in a room that was first occupied 9,000 years ago?” Estimates of the earliest occupation of the site vary, but archaeologists have found artifacts in local caves dating to the Neolithic period and even earlier. Privacy Statement Even in the 19th century, few travelers ventured through its arid, desolate landscapes, which were known to be full of briganti, or brigands. Matera's bread is a local bread made with durum wheat, dating to the Kingdom of Naples, and typically featuring three incisions, symbolizing the Holy Trinity. The Sassi are habitations dug into the calcareous rock itself, which is characteristic of Basilicata and Apulia. It’s a form of gentrification, but it doesn’t quite fit the model, since the Sassi were already empty, and nobody is being displaced.” Today, around 3,000 people live in the Sassi and about half of the dwellings are occupied, with Matera firmly on southern Italy’s tourist circuit. )", Museo Laboratorio della Civiltà Contadina, City of Vicenza and the Palladian Villas of the Veneto, Arab-Norman Palermo and the Cathedral Churches of Cefalù and Monreale, Longobards in Italy, Places of Power (568–774 A.D.), Prehistoric pile dwellings around the Alps, Venetian Works of Defence between 15th and 17th centuries, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Matera&oldid=989930440#History, Populated places established in the 3rd century BC, Short description is different from Wikidata, Articles containing Italian-language text, Official website different in Wikidata and Wikipedia, Articles containing Neapolitan-language text, All articles with vague or ambiguous time, Articles with unidentified words from April 2019, Articles needing additional references from March 2019, All articles needing additional references, Wikipedia articles with MusicBrainz area identifiers, Wikipedia articles with WorldCat-VIAF identifiers, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, This page was last edited on 21 November 2020, at 20:35. Matera was built such that it is hidden, but made it difficult to provide a water supply to its inhabitants. In the southern Italian town of Matera, I followed a sinuous laneway down into a haunting district known as the Sassi (Italian for the “stones”), where some 1,500 cave dwellings honeycomb the flanks of a steep ravine. “Only 35 percent of the cave residences had been declared dangerous,” De Ruggieri says, “but 100 percent of them were evacuated.” The abandoned architectural treasures included many rupestrian, or rock-hewn, churches, covered with priceless Byzantine frescoes. A sleek stone bath was embedded in the cave’s farthest corner. Signor Nicoletti would try to find his old home, accompanied by both his sons and two of his grandchildren. He said, ‘They died from hunger, malaria, I don’t want to remember.’”, In the late 1950s, as the Sassi’s last inhabitants were being evacuated from their houses, about two dozen Materan students, who had grown up in the more modern, affluent world of the Piano, decided to rebel against their city’s notoriety.