The stones of Matera… what are they?
Contrary to what one might think when reading the word “sassi”, these are not huge boulders! The Civita district – built on the rocky outcrop that divides them – forms part of the historic centre of Matera. In 1993, they were designated as UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
It is, in fact, a case of Two districts of Matera: Sasso Caveoso and Sasso Barisano, designated as UNESCO World Heritage Sites in 1993. Buildings and rock-cut structures carved into the rock of the Murgia Materana: a genuine urban settlement stemming from forms of civilisation and human settlement dating back to prehistoric times – from the fortified villages of the Neolithic period to the settlements of the rock-cut civilisation of Eastern origin (9th–11th centuries) – the urban infrastructure of the Sassi, comprising walkways, drainage systems and cisterns –; from the civitas from its Western Norman-Swabian origins (11th–13th centuries), with its fortifications, through the subsequent Renaissance expansions (15th–16th centuries) and Baroque urban developments (17th–18th centuries), culminating in the social and sanitary decline of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, right up to the compulsory evacuation ordered in the 1950s by ministerial regulations; this, however, was followed by a major restoration and regeneration programme that began in 1986.
It is easy to come across Renaissance and Baroque façades that open onto 8th-century cisterns, which have been converted into dwellings. Some underground chambers were regularly excavated right up until the 1950s; others were bricked up and forgotten, hidden away in the hillside.
The Long-nosed diver, Built in the 19th century, it is a water reservoir situated beneath Piazza Vittorio Veneto which serves as a water collection system, and was built in the 19th century. The Sassi, the working-class quarter, together with the aristocratic and medieval Civita, built on an ancient acropolis, are in fact a tapestry full of surprises; even though they appear static and compact, encased in bare stone, at times barely touched by a coat of lime.
Description
The Sassi of Matera are
a cultural landscape
according to the definition given by UNESCO when it included them in its World Heritage Site
The plural form stems from the fact that there are two of them, not because the houses or premises in the area are called “sassi”.
These rise up around and along the bottom of two valley channels, shaped by the flow of water, which is channelled through the so-called “grabiglioni” at the bottom of the channels.
The Sasso Caveoso It faces south, towards Montescaglioso, and is reminiscent of a theatre auditorium, with the houses arranged in tiers.
The Sasso Barisano, Instead, it faces north-west and is situated along the road which, leaving Matera, led to Bari (in Puglia), and features carved doorways and friezes.
Indeed, the Sassi, together with the working-class quarter and the Civita – the aristocratic, medieval quarter overlooking an ancient acropolis – are full of surprises.
A map of Matera
When viewed from above, the layout of the ancient city resembles an’Greek omega. Piazza del Sedile, below Civita, lies halfway between the Caveoso and the Barisano districts. You descend into the Sassi through a series of arches, almost like hidden passageways. These descents were flanked by irrigation channels that fed drip cisterns, of which there can be as many as seven in some houses.
The neighbourhoods
In turn, the Sassi are made up of neighbourhoods, districts and quarters:
- u lammòrde
- a paravèse
- the pendàfeche
- the mole
- u chianèdde
The two valleys are naturally separated by the the cliff at La Civita, which is home to the Romanesque cathedral. At the foot of the cliff and at the upper edge of the Sassi lies the Plan that is to say, the post-medieval historic centre, beyond which lies post-evacuation Matera.
Opposite the Gravina di Matera there is the’the Murgia Plateau, with rock-hewn churches scattered along the slopes of the ravines, which form part of the Murgia Materana Park of the same name and are protected by the park’s management body.
The neighbourhoods consist of a group of houses facing onto the same open space, often with a well in the centre, and formed the heart of social life, solidarity and cooperation in the Sassi.
Take, for example, the communal well where clothes were washed and the oven where bread was kneaded: these made the neighbourhood the fundamental unit of community life.
The dwellings were lit from above, in the style of a North African kasbah, and maintained a constant temperature of 15 degrees, with the thermal mass of the marine tuff acting as a natural air-conditioning system.
A very simple law of physics: the summer sun’s rays are perpendicular and scorching, so they stayed outside; the winter rays, on the other hand, are oblique and glide across the floor of the caves.
Although prima facie Although the Sassi may appear to be a chaotic jumble, there is in fact a carefully thought-out design behind them. The walk down into the Sassi is full of surprises. Narrow streets and steps reveal some marvellous churches, monastic complexes carved into the rock, Benedictine monasteries e Byzantine laws, where the monks’ cells cluster round an underground church.
The main ones are located in urban areas and are:
- Santa Lucia alle Malve, a rock-cut complex that once housed a monastic community
- Convicinio di S. Antonio: a complex comprising four rock-cut crypts
- Santa Maria di Idris on top of the cliff of the same name
- Santa Barbara, with its wealth of frescoes
- Madonna delle Virtù, which, together with the church of San Nicola dei Greci above it, now hosts major sculpture exhibitions
- San Pietro Barisano, with a masonry façade and bell tower, and an interior almost entirely carved out of the rock
In the heart of the Sasso Caveoso district stands the stone-built church of San Pietro Caveoso, the town’s ancient parish church, perched high above the sheer drop of the Gravina.
It is difficult to identify the stylistic influences of these monuments: one can make out Orthodox iconostases in churches with a Latin plan.
The frescoes are less rigid than those of the anchorites of Asia Minor; the Madonnas are less like queens and more like ordinary women (a fact which was appreciated by P.P. Pasolini in the creation of his The Gospel according to Matthew.
The layout of the Sassi is reminiscent of the splendid Mistrà in Laconia: a beehive-like town that survived the fall of Byzantium to enjoy a decade of freedom. This layout stems from the need to collect rainwater, a feature typical of Byzantine cities – according to Laureano – and one that is also found in Apulia and Lucania.
I Sassi ospitano anche, all’interno dello storico Palazzo Pomarici (XVI-XVII sec. d.C.), ubicato sulla Civita, il MUSMA (Museo della Scultura Contemporanea – Matera). È anche possibile visitare numerose “case grotta” che ricostruiscono le dimore degli abitanti dei Sassi ante sfollamento, arredate con mobilio e attrezzi autentici del periodo.
World Heritage Site
I The Sassi of Matera They were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1993 and hold the distinction of being the first site in southern Italy to be included on the list.
The reasons given describe the Sassi as a an extraordinary urban ecosystem, capable of perpetuating ways of living in caves from the most distant prehistoric past right up to the present day. The Sassi of Matera are an exceptional example of the careful use, over time, of the resources provided by nature: water, soil and energy.
According to the report by the commission that assessed the site’s compliance with UNESCO’s evaluation criteria, Matera’s nomination meets the following criteria:
Criterion III: The Sassi and the Park of the Rock-Cut Churches of Matera constitute an exceptional testimony to a vanished civilisation. The region’s earliest inhabitants lived in underground dwellings and worshipped in rock-cut churches, which were designed to serve as an example to future generations of how to utilise the qualities of the natural environment – harnessing the resources of the sun, rock and water.
Criterion IV: The Sassi and the Park of the Rock-Cut Churches of Matera are an outstanding example of an architectural and landscape ensemble that bears witness to significant stages in the history of humankind. These range from primitive underground dwellings hewn into the stone faces of the ravines to sophisticated urban structures built using the excavated material, and from well-preserved natural landscapes with important biological and geological features to urban landscapes with complex structures.
Criterion V: The Sassi and the Park of the Rock-Cut Churches of Matera are an outstanding example of a traditional human settlement and land-use pattern representative of a culture which, from its very origins, has maintained a harmonious relationship with its natural environment, and which is now subject to potential risks. The balance between human intervention and the ecosystem has been maintained for over nine millennia, during which time parts of the settlement carved into the rock were gradually adapted to meet the growing needs of its inhabitants.
The Sassi in news reports, literature, the media and popular culture
Natural caves, underground structures, cisterns, enormous fortified enclosures, farmhouses, churches and palaces follow one another and coexist, carved out of and built into the tuff of the ravines
Pietro Laureano writes in his book Stone gardens.
Vegetable patches and roof gardens jutted out from the rooftops. The rooftops sometimes served as cemeteries: the living underground, the dead above ground.
The words of the chronicler Verricelli in his *Cronica de la città di Matera* (1595–1596):
In Matera, the dead lie above the living.
Since the inhabitants lit their lamps outside their homes at sunset, anyone looking down on the city from above would have seen the Sassi light up like a starry sky, which inspired Verricelli to state that “the dead are above the living, the sky and the stars can be seen beneath men’s feet”.”.
This conjured up such a evocative image that it led to the belief – albeit a rather far-fetched hypothesis – that the name Matera derives from the Greek word “meteora”, meaning, in fact, “starry sky”.
I arrived in Matera at about eleven in the morning. I had read in the guidebook that it is a picturesque town, well worth a visit, with a museum of ancient art and some curious troglodyte dwellings [that is, carved into the rock]. Having walked a short distance from the station, I came to a road which was lined on one side by old houses and ran alongside a precipice on the other. Matera lies in that precipice. The shape of that ravine was strange; like two half-funnels placed side by side, separated by a small spur and joining at the bottom in a common apex, where, from up there, one could see a white church, Santa Maria de Idris, which seemed to be stuck into the ground. These inverted cones, these funnels, are called the Sassi. They have the shape with which, at school, we used to imagine Dante’s hell; in that narrow space between the façades and the slope, the streets run, serving both as pavements for those coming out of the houses above and as roofs for those below. Looking up, I finally saw the whole of Matera appear, like a sloping wall. It really is a beautiful, picturesque and impressive city.
Carlo Levi’s description in Christ Stopped at Eboli It conjures up the image of wide-open eyes. The narrator is his sister, who describes them as “two half-funnels separated by a rocky outcrop, the Civita, and the white church of Santa Maria de Idris, which looked as though it had been driven into the ground”.
The two funnel-shaped features are the Sassi, and, according to Levi, they have the shape with which, at school, Dante’s Inferno was identified, but which in fact formed part of a complex and efficient system.
Numerous films have found the Sassi to be the ideal setting.
Starting with Mel Gibson’s *The Passion of the Christ*, for which he considered the location to be the “perfect” setting for Jerusalem.
Among others:
- The Gospel According to Matthew by Pier Paolo Pasolini
- Christ Stopped at Eboli by Francesco Rosi
- Ben-Hur by Timur Bekmambetov
- Wonder Woman by Patty Jenkins
Manga too: some chapters of Katsura Hoshino’s *D.Gray-man* series, or rather, some episodes of the corresponding anime adaptation:
- The Ghost of Matera
- The air of the old man of the earth and the night of the sky
- Play me a lullaby
The displacement
Carlo Levi was a key figure in Italian literature, but not only that.
He came to know Matera following his confinement to the Lucanian region by the Fascist regime, and was thus able to witness the height of the demographic collapse of the Sassi. Sheep farming had already been in decline since the previous century, whilst the population had swelled out of all proportion, to the extent that vegetable plots and roof gardens had been replaced by raised floors, and cisterns converted into studio flats, inhabited by large families – including mules and sheep. Hygiene and sanitary conditions were extremely and blatantly precarious. Levi, therefore, took the matter to heart and personally helped to resolve the problem.
The 1950s were not so long ago, yet conditions in Matera seemed to have regressed by centuries. The infant mortality rate was four times higher than the national average.
Prime Minister De Gasperi visited Matera in 1950, where he witnessed the severity of the hardship, and so commissioned a local Member of Parliament to draft a bill to turn the city’s fortunes around. Fifteen thousand people (half the city’s entire population) were crammed together, with no sewerage system and an extremely high risk of epidemics.
Emilio Clombo presented his report a year later, submitting it to Parliament as Bill No. 2141, “Regeneration of the Sassi of Matera”, which was unanimously approved in 1952 as the “Special Act for the Regeneration of the Sassi” (No. 619), which, precisely because of the person who proposed it, is also known as the “Colombo Act”.
Although the new neighbourhoods were designed by leading figures in the architectural world, such as Ludovico Quaroni, Carlo Aymonino and Luigi Piccinato, and although they were by far more comfortable than the Sassi, the process of leaving them behind was painful and disheartening.
There is no doubt that Matera’s urban development was remarkable, underpinned by a well-thought-out town planning scheme.
Carlo Levi was referring precisely to all of this in his novel.
Sasso Barisano
Matera’s origins date back a very long time, as evidenced by the discovery in the surrounding area of a series of settlements dating back continuously to the Palaeolithic Age
Indeed, various artefacts dating from that period have been found in the caves scattered along the Gravine of Matera, bearing witness to the presence of groups of hunters. During the Neolithic period, settlements became more permanent, to the extent that there are clear traces of several fortified villages dating from that period, particularly on the Murgia Timone. With the Metal Age came the first urban settlement, that of present-day Civita, on the right bank of the Gravina[19].
Built on the site of a prehistoric fortified village, this structure is thought to have Greek origins, as Volpe states in his *Historical Memoirs, Secular and Religious, on the City of Matera*, also citing Ughelli, Pacichelli and Father Bonaventura da Lama, who had reached the same conclusion.
This would be confirmed by the town’s emblem, the ox with ears of wheat, which, according to Volpe himself, is a typical symbol of Magna Graecia; furthermore, Gattini cites the hypothesis put forward by some historians that it reproduces the emblem of the city of Metaponto, which was indeed an ox, whilst ears of wheat were recurring motifs on Greek coins. To support this, Gattini also quotes some verses by the poet Tommaso Stigliani:
The sailor from ancient Metaponto, which in our day is known as Matera
and refers to the welcome Matera gave to the refugees from Metaponto following the destruction of their city by Hannibal.
Sasso Caveoso
During the Magna Graecia period, Matera maintained close ties with the colonies situated on the southern coast; subsequently, in Roman times, it served merely as a transit and supply centre. In 664 AD, Matera came under Lombard rule and was annexed to the Duchy of Benevento. The 9th and 10th centuries were marked by fierce fighting between the Lombards themselves, the Saracens and the Byzantines, who made several attempts to seize the territory; the city was destroyed by the troops of Louis II, Emperor of the Franks, precisely in an attempt to drive out the Saracens.
Meanwhile, from the 8th century onwards, the Matera area was the scene of a significant influx of Benedictine and Byzantine monks, who settled along the caves of the Gravina, transforming them into rock-hewn churches. Following the Norman settlement in 1043, the city enjoyed a period of peace. In the centuries that followed, amidst famines and earthquakes, Matera was for a long time a ‘Regia’ city, having freed itself from feudal rule by redeeming itself on several occasions; however, under the Aragonese, the city was ceded to Count Giovan Carlo Tramontano, who was killed in 1514 by the population, oppressed by heavy taxes. In 1663, during the Spanish period, Matera was separated from the province of Terra d’Otranto, of which it had until then been an integral part, becoming the capital of Basilicata and the seat of the Royal Court. It retained this status until 1806, when Joseph Bonaparte transferred these powers to Potenza. During the Risorgimento, the Lucanian pro-dictatorial committee failed to keep its promises regarding the redistribution of state-owned land; discontent began to spread – fuelled in part by the Legitimists – and in Matera this erupted on 8 August 1860 with the Gattini massacre, the first sign of rebellion that preceded the post-unification brigandage. In 1927, the city became the provincial capital.
Matera was the first city in Southern Italy to rise up against the Nazis; indeed, on 21 September 1943 – the day of the uprising and the Matera massacre – the people of Matera rose up against the oppression inflicted by the Nazi occupation. Eleven people were killed as a result of machine-gun fire from the retreating Germans. The day culminated in a ferocious Nazi reprisal that claimed the lives of a further 15 people, both civilians and military personnel, who were blown up in the “militia building”.
In 1945, some of the first popular uprisings in the south took place over the allocation of uncultivated land; these were resolved by the enactment, between 1946 and 1947, of the Ponte decrees (named after Aurelio Ponte, Prefect of Matera); these were precursors to the land reform.
In 1948, the issue of the Sassi di Matera arose
, raised first by Palmiro Togliatti, and later by Alcide De Gasperi.
In 1952, a national law mandated the clearance of the Sassi and the construction of new residential neighbourhoods, which gave rise to the new town where the 15,000 inhabitants of the Sassi were resettled.
In 1980, it was partially damaged by the Irpinia earthquake and the aftershocks that followed. In 1986, a new national law provided funding for the restoration of Matera’s historic districts, which had fallen into disrepair after more than thirty years of neglect.
In 1993, at a conference in Cartagena de Indias, the city was designated a “World Heritage Site” and, in 2014, named “European Capital of Culture 2019”.
