I'm almost too tired to write this, it has been such a long day. We had to be up at 6 as the bus arrived to take us to Matera at 7. We drove through fields of vines rather than olives this time, and the roads were very narrow. I found it quite terrifying because we were in a big coach which was rather wider than half the road, and we kept meeting lorries which were similarly too wide for the road. Sometimes we passed with only inches to spare.
We were in Matera by 10, and set off to see the sassi, the caves where people lived. These were not natural caves, they were dug out of the soft limestone to provide places to live.
We walked through a modern city of baroque churches and graceful palaces. Then we found ourselves first looking down at the dramatic tangle of grey stone houses; a contrast with the elegance of the new town.
When you walk down a steep staircase, you are amongst this jumble of buildings. Buildings climb up and down the hillside, houses piled on top of each other, the roofs of some acting as streets for those above. They were carved out of the rock and the original caves extended with facades that look like normal homes.
Matera is one of the oldest continuously inhabited settlements in history dating back to the Palaeolithic period. What makes Matera different from other Palaeolithic settlements, though, is that those inhabitants, and their ancestors, never left. Instead, they dug in—quite literally. In the Iron and Bronze Ages, newly-equipped with metal tools, settlers dug underground caverns, cisterns, and tombs in the landscape’s soft volcanic stone (called tufa). Famously, they also dug dwellings.
Those dwellings, and those people, remained throughout the later waves of rulers and empires, from Greeks to Romans to Byzantines. They (and their descendants) are still there today.
On the other side of the ravine from the town you can see the simple forms of the neolithic caves where people lived 7000 years ago.
Things were a bit more modern in later times, but not much. People continued to live in these one-room stone homes, without heat or plumbing, often with donkeys, chickens or other animals sharing the same space.
We visited the Casa Grotta di Vico Solitario, which shows what living there in the 1950s would have been like.
This was the one crowded room
The striped blanket on the right is on top of the bed.
This house had quite a sophisticated kitchen, with two charcoal burners in the stove.
The water came from a cistern below the house. Rainwater from the roofs was stored in underground cisterns and pulled up in a bucket.
The donkey shared the living quarters
A hole in the floor was used to store the manure from the donkey, and this generated heat to heat the house. Don't even think of the smell! There was no bathroom of course - just a pot beside the bed.
Disease was rife. Conditions were so bad that, in 1952, the government of Italy passed a law forcing Matera’s dwellers out of their old quarters and into new, modern buildings. The sassi were left empty and unmaintained. But in 1993, the area was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site. And as it has become more popular, people have started moving back into the sassi, restoring them and even opening them as luxury hotels or smart restaurants.
There are also many rock cut churches, but I've run out of steam and will have to write more another day. I'm only about half way through the description of today as we went to Alberobello in the afternoon, but I'll have to write about that tomorrow.
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