by Bill Bryson
Levi was a gifted polemicist, and his concise retelling of his sister’s experience changed Matera’s destiny. Christ Stopped at Eboli was widely translated, and the Sassi became notorious. Italian newspapers started calling Matera a national embarrassment. There were many villages in bad shape across southern Italy, but, as Toxey notes, the “mere idea of a cave, with its subhuman associations, offended the progressive mentality of the designers and leaders of the postwar world.”
In 1950 Alcide De Gasperi, the head of the Christian Democrats, visited the Sassi and declared that “this sad remnant of past centuries should disappear.” Two years later, the party passed the first bill for the risanamento, or cleanup, of the Sassi. Materans living in the worst caves would be moved; the more habitable grotte would be renovated.
At the time, the United States was funding the rebuilding of Europe through the Marshall Plan. With money flowing in, the Materan risanamento could be done with style. Italian architects were filled with modernist ideas for creating ideal communities. Problems of economic inequality that had never been solved politically might, they believed, be solved aesthetically. Materans would not be forced into generic new apartments; rather, they would be immersed in communities that reproduced the nurturing aspects of Sassi life—the courtyards where people met and gossiped, the communal ovens where they baked their special bread.
The Italian planners had in mind the ambitious example of the Tennessee Valley Authority, which had resettled thousands of Appalachian families. An American sociologist, Friedrich Friedmann, led a team of researchers—including a historian, a doctor, a geographer, and a psychologist—who assessed conditions in the Sassi. After architects devised several potential resettlement schemes, Friedmann’s team asked the peasants which design they thought was best. In the new rural development of La Martella, four miles west of the Sassi, the architect Ludovico Quaroni attempted to re-create the open-air vicinati that the Materans had used as their plazas and drawing rooms. Each resettled family was given a house with an adjoining barn for animals; the bedroom windows looked out on the stables, so that residents could keep an eye on the beasts at night, as they had in the Sassi. The first families were moved to La Martella in 1954. The Giornale del Mezzogiorno declared that Materans had traveled “from the darkness of the Sassi to cottages in the green countryside!” Italian newspapers continued to support the cause, and the government began encouraging residents whose caves had originally been thought salvageable to move.
The process of moving the peasants, though, did not go as planned. Not enough land was made available for farming. The new vicinati did not feel like the courtyards of Matera—they were not placed at the juncture of several houses, so residents did not naturally spill into them. Ambitions flagged, and builders began putting up ordinary apartment complexes.
In 1961 a reporter for La Stampa found the Sassi empty but for a man and his lonely mule, which had been “made melancholy,” its owner speculated, by the disappearance of the people it had known. In the article, the director of local tourism suggested, hopefully, that the Sassi should become a museum. The newspaper later reported that locals wanted to use cement to bury the Sassi—or dynamite to blow up the area. Such radical measures turned out not to be necessary. Long before the caves were empty, the oldest ones began crumbling, and the government began fencing them off. Matera’s ancient settlement appeared to be coming to an end.
In fact, the Sassi was about to be reborn. Squatters began occupying some of the caves, and others were used for drugs and prostitution. Then Raffaello De Ruggieri, a lawyer who considered the depopulation campaign a grievous mistake, moved in. “People felt I was crazy to subject my wife to the desolation and emptiness of the Sassi,” he recalls. The De Ruggieris were relieved to discover, however, that they had some friendly neighbors. Local artisans used the caves as workshops for making cucù—ceramic rooster whistles that are a town tradition.
Other young Italians began seeing the Sassi’s potential, and they became homesteaders. Roofs were buttressed, and modern plumbing was installed. In 1986 the Italian government encouraged the Sassi’s revival by offering subsidies that cut the cost of restoration work in half. Small shops began to appear, and in 1992 La Traccia, a software company, opened. “We came here because everyone else was boycotting it,” Franco Petrella, one of the owners, told an Italian newspaper.
For a time, the new Sassi and the old butted heads. When a pioneering restaurant, the Caffè del Cavaliere, opened, someone set off a small bomb in its entryway. The Corriere della Sera reported that some new residents felt as if they were living in the Wild West, and were thinking of buying guns to fend off “harassment, requests for money, and acts of intimidation.”
But order was established, and as the limestone hilltop was restored its rough simplicity found new admirers. In 1993 UNESCO named the Sassi a World Heritage site, and with that designation “tourism really began,” according to Nicola Rizzi, a retired high school teacher who was born in the Sassi. Cave dwellings were combined to form restaurants and boutique hotels.
Materan culture, once thought backward, was now admired for its warmth and its precocious commitment to sustainability. By the turn of the millennium, the Sassi had a popular jazz club, and artisanal winemakers were storing their grapes in the limestone warrens. A candlelit cave set on a hilltop turns out to be an ideal spot for a holistic spa.
In February I flew to Bari, a port city on Italy’s southeastern coast, and drove 40 miles, to the hilltop. To enter the Sassi now, you have to park on the edge of sprawling modern Matera, which sits along the western side of the old cave town, and go the final hundred yards on foot. The modern quarter was built on a plain above the cliffs, so you walk down a winding road to reach the Sassi. It was night when I arrived at my bed-and-breakfast, the Casa nei Sassi, which opened a few years ago. Light from street lamps installed in the 1990s reflected off the paving stones. Cats prowled alleys that glistened in a light rain. For centuries, the street where I was staying had been an open sewer; the Fascists had paved it over. In the 2000s, the strip became crowded with clubs and restaurants. It can get noisy during the summer, but is tranquil in the middle of winter. My room was at the top of a dozen twisting steps, in a converted hayloft, and it overlooked a bar where I sampled Padre Peppe, a Southern Italian liqueur made from green walnuts. From my balcony, I had a view of hundreds of irregular terraces, odd abutments, incidental buttresses, and half-hidden alleys.
The next morning, when the sun came up over the plateau that faces Matera to the east, I set out for a walk. You can get anywhere in town by way of the mazelike steps, but I took another road built by the Fascists, Via Madonna delle Virtù, which follows the edge of a thousand-foot cliff. Soon I stood on an outcropping—slabs of stone ending in a low wall. Behind me were the grotte, hunched and worn, one on top of the other. In the oldest part of the city, there are almost no stores, bars, or restaurants. Laundry fluttered from an occasional balcony, but most of the structures were unoccupied. Rows of vacant caves looked like giant skulls, with the empty doorways as eyes. The limestone walls were pockmarked, rain-streaked, and sun-bleached, and they varied in hue, from gray to yellow, as the light moved across them.
To see the new Matera emerging from the old, you have to look up the hillside. These residences have the best light and, being closest to the modern city, were the easiest to renovate. They first drew architects and other creative people, then arts professionals and Web designers, and, finally, wealthier types. It’s like a tiny Tribeca. Many of the cave interiors have been playfully reimagined; in some, ceilings have been knocked out, creating three-story aeries.
On my walk, I came upon a four-star hotel, Casa di Lucio, which opened in 2001. In the hotel’s windowless dining room, white laminate moderno tables were neatly aligned, and recessed wall lighting emphasized the pebbly nap and the roseate color of the limestone. A deep cistern was on display under glass. The hotel, whose rooms are spread out over several caves, had the on
e-of-a-kind glamour of the paradors that occupy former monasteries and fortresses in Spain. Nearby, in the basement of the Palazzo Gattini, whose owner was assassinated by brigands in 1860, there is a luxury spa offering hot-stone massages for 90 euros. An old cistern had been turned into a small swimming pool.
The new residents of Matera don’t always seem imbued with the communal spirit of the old days: some property owners have fenced off vicinati, making the most public part of the Sassi private. As I went around the Sassi, I was relieved when I came upon a buzzing marketplace where apples filled straw baskets and smoked fish dangled from wooden trestles. An energetic young woman was currying a donkey and chatting with a young man and woman in rough clothes. A dusty wooden cart was leaning against a cobbled wall. But when the carter smiled her teeth were perfect, and the way the cart leaned against the wall was archly jaunty. This hive of activity turned out to be a movie set: a Hollywood crew was filming a new version of Ben-Hur, starring Morgan Freeman. Next to a 13th-century church, San Pietro Caveoso, a Roman eagle had been placed atop a newly constructed arch—the scaffolding in back gave it away. A crew had installed klieg lights above the ancient buildings. I discovered that Christ the Lord, an adaptation of the Anne Rice novel, had been filmed in Matera a few months earlier. When I went into a grotta covered with a bed of straw, I joked to a production assistant, “Is this where Christ was born?”
“No,” he answered. “It’s just a typical Roman stable.”
Matera has played a prominent role in several biblical films, serving as a stand-in for ancient Jerusalem. Christ has walked the town’s streets at least four times, most famously in Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew, released in 1964. I became used to men going up and down the stairways in tunics, skullcaps, and neon sneakers.
Visitors armed with new guidebooks that praise the Sassi’s artisanal traditions sometimes know more about the town’s history than locals whose families were transferred to the modern quarter. I walked by a handsome Renaissance structure with a precipitous view over a low stone wall, and asked a local policeman the building’s name. “Convento di Santa Lucia,” he said, adding that he’d learned it only recently, from Japanese tourists.
At the end of my walk, I looked across the valley, past a stream that had carved out the mountain on which the Sassi clustered, toward terraces of olive and fig trees. They were once cultivated, but now grew wild and unpruned. Across the gorge were weathered limestone caves that had sheltered shepherds since Neolithic times. Not so different from the refurbished grotte behind me, they seemed to mock the idea of human progress.
And yet Matera has an affable commitment to the young and the new. The town increasingly has the feel of a small Bologna. It has a branch of the University of Basilicata and a classical conservatory, whose students’ music pours out as you walk under its windows. This winter there was an exhibit on Pasolini. Each September a women’s-fiction festival takes place. A jazz festival, Gezziamoci, runs nearly the whole year, with performances in and around the Sassi, and a national archaeological museum, in a former convent, displays the riches of local digs. You can play minigolf in an underground cistern, and the new restaurants of Matera produce extraordinarily good food, turning what was once shameful into a source of pride. Matera’s cucina povera contains a lot of chickpeas, fava beans, and crushed peppers. An especially delicious dish is called ciallèdd, which, in Matera, traditionally combines eggs, the springy town bread, and flowers that grow in the nearby Murgia. (Yellow asphodels are considered the sweetest.) Restaurants proudly announce their local sourcing, and waiters are happy to tell you the story of your dish, as if a parcel of Northern California had dropped into Basilicata.
This past October the European Commission named Matera one of its two capitals of European culture for 2019. (The other is Plov-div, Bulgaria, a city that also traces its history to the Bronze Age.) Previous cultural capitals have included Istanbul and Marseilles, so the recognition is noteworthy for a small town in a region without an airport. The European Union has offered Matera 50 million euros for investment, and tourism will surely rise further.
The organizers of Matera 2019 have designed an official logo, a horn-shaped tube with six extrusions. Depending on which resident you ask, the image is meant to symbolize either the old communal courtyards of the town or its intricate water system. The town’s pride in the coming celebration was evident: as I walked around the Sassi, the symbol showed up with Pynchonian frequency.
The EC designation is seen, in part, as an acknowledgment of Matera’s fraught history. No official apology has ever been given for the forced exodus. Half a century after the depopulation campaign, few cultural historians support the decision. It is now a shameful memory of a more desperate time in Italian history, after the trauma of the Second World War, when the country was intent on erasing its past. The transfer of Materans is seen as one of many patronizing attempts by elites to save indigenous people from themselves.
The town’s mayor, Salvatore Adduce, told me that the depopulation of the Sassi was “a laceration.” Despite the best efforts of Italy’s modernists, Materan culture did not flourish outside the caves. Some former Sassi residents abandoned farming and became construction workers, building homes for other émigrés. When that work ran out, they moved north, to work in factories. Many Ma-terans eventually lost their dialect, their customs, their trades, and—most of all—their sense of community. A number of those who stayed behind joined the Italian bureaucracy and contributed to the demise of their town’s way of life. As Toxey, the author of Materan Contradictions, has written:
In the space of twenty-five years, the government transformed the populace from a dialect-speaking, land-working, troglodyte peasant culture that largely existed outside the Italian nation into wage-earning, tax-paying, Italian-speaking state employees and blue-collar consumers . . . dependent upon the government for work, wages, housing (rented from the government).
Locals were excited when Matera was named a capital of European culture—the mayor cried on national TV—but the accolade raised difficult questions. How do you commemorate a disastrous social experiment? What should Matera become? What should the town do with all those empty grotte? And how should Basilicata handle the influx of tourists?
Materans agreed that they did not want the Sassi to become just another afternoon tourist stop. “We don’t want busloads of barbarians setting up tents,” Mayor Adduce told me. “We want people who, above all, can know what Matera is.”
The artistic director of Matera 2019 is Joseph Grima, a former editor of Domus, the European design magazine. Grima’s approach might be called anti–Olympic City: he wants to avoid monumental gestures. The only thing that he plans to add to the Materan landscape is a portable concert hall, by the architect Renzo Piano, that Grima found in a warehouse in Milan several years ago. The structure, made of interlocking curved wooden ribs, can be brought to Matera, used for a year, and then taken down again. It fits with the town’s sustainable aesthetic, and is properly modest. Grima told me that he had thought hard about the EU award. “It certainly brings wealth, but it has also killed so many cities,” he said, as tourists and destinations catering to them hollow out the real life of a place. He said of Matera that it would be particularly cruel to kill a city that has just come back from the dead.
Italy is constantly being confronted with challenges from its past: the palazzo too big to heat, the metro dig upended by a Roman ruin. At the same time, Italians like to say “Si fa”—It works out. Lately, though, things have not been working out in Basilicata. It is one of the poorest regions in Italy, and the unemployment rate is 14.7 percent. Its manufacturing jobs are being lost at a rapid pace, and between 2008 and 2013 the economy contracted by 13.6 percent.
One of Basilicata’s few bright spots is the Sassi. Not only does it draw tourist dollars; the Italians who now fill the caves are better educated and better paid than the people who left them. They are part of the generation that is succee
ding the failed industrial one. Alberto Cottica, a Web entrepreneur who was a consultant to the Matera 2019 committee, told me, “The people who moved in were hipster central.” The Sassi has a lot of digital businesses—broadband is available—and it can seem as if every ounce of Matera’s patrimony were being presented on local websites. Last year, part of a prominent ancient building was loaned to a millennial-led organization called unMonastery—a group of self-described “civic hackers” who run a “social clinic” that embeds “skilled individuals within communities that could benefit from their presence.” (The group, now thriving, recently decamped for Athens.) Everything produced by Matera 2019 will be digitally accessible and copyright-free.
Grima champions Matera’s new digital ethic, and notes proudly that there is no plan to build a conventional new museum or exhibit space. To collect the artistic riches from the region and put them on display in the Sassi would deracinate them, he argues. Instead, curators in Matera will construct an online database that can guide visitors to various local collections. “The region has an extraordinary abundance—much of it in private hands,” Grima said. Matera plans to open a reading room to help visitors appreciate the region’s cultural treasures, but the objects will remain where they are. Matera’s vibrant virtual community, it is hoped, can replace the traditional one that the government destroyed.
One day I took a tour of the Sassi with a man named Vito Festa, who grew up in the district in the 1950s. He is unusually open about his past: many older Materans still refuse to visit the Sassi or even talk about it. Some of those who built new homes overlooking the caves made sure that there were no windows facing their old dwellings. They found it humiliating to confront the way they had lived before the government rescued them. They had been told they were filthy so many times that they had internalized the sentiment.