Once Matera was considered the shame of Italy. Today, the city, which is made up of cave settlements, is UNESCO World Heritage Site and, this year, European Capital of Culture. Thus, the “City of Stones” faces new challenges.
“Do you know the story of the Monachelli of Matera? The goblin with the red pointed hat? No, I’ll tell you,” says Raffaele Pentasuglia. The bearded, sympathetic mid-thirties manages his art workshop in the famous “Città dei sassi”, the city of stones, as the cave settlements in the southern Italian region of Basilicata are called. “Of Matera, the former shame of Italy know, yes,” he begins.
Pentasuglia says that until the beginning of the 1950s, around 15,000 people lived here in the caves, without water, electricity and sewage system. Often even with their pets. In view of the devastating hygienic conditions, the mortality rate of the children was high. Often the newborns did not survive a few days, so they could not be baptized. “And here’s where the Monachelli come in. Legend has it that the goblins embody the souls of these children and still haunt Matera.” They are even supposed to protect a treasure that only someone who manages to take away the pointed cap from one of them will find. “And as is the case with legends, there are supposed to have been farmers who met this Monachelli, but never caught them,” Pentasuglia concludes with a grin on his story.
Pentasuglia’s workshop is located in the Baroque quarter, from where narrow streets lead down to the cave settlements and rock churches. Many of these former homes are now converted into restaurants, posh hotels and B & B or shops. Like the crochet room of Mrs. Angela, almost at the foot of the gorge, which separates the Sasso Barisano from the Sasso Caveoso, as the cave district is called. At the top of Sasso Caveoso is the famous rock church of Santa Maria de Idris. Mrs. Angela, an elderly, petite but very spirited woman, boasts that she was one of the first to relocate here with her business in the early 1990s. At that time the city administration gave the caves in concession.
Stone carved dwellings
As you walk through Ms. Angela’s boutique, which digs deep into the rock, you get a vague idea of how people used to settle there. The tufa of the Gravina, as the landscape here is called, is a particularly soft limestone. For thousands of years the local river of the same name has dug in. And man has imitated him since the early Stone Age. The cave settlements of Matera are among the oldest of humanity.
One only has to look into one of the many abandoned caves surrounded by scrub: right at the entrance is the day area with the stove, in the rock walls are filing chisels. Behind it lies the sleeping area, also this one with several niches dug in the rocks, which sometimes also served as bed for the small children. At the back, often dug a few steps lower, was the place for the mule. In order to give the visitor a true picture, a few caves have now been equipped true to the original.
As one wanders the streets, one wonders how the people who once lived here in dire poverty would react today, they might see the luxury rooms into which some caves have been turned. In 1993, Unesco had designated the sites as World Heritage Sites. In 2019 Matera is even one of the two European capitals of culture, the other is Plovdiv in Bulgaria.
The eyesore
The inhumane conditions in which a part of the population of Matera lived, put the writer Carlo Levi in his 1945 novel “Christ only came to Eboli” open. He had been banished by the fascists in 1935 to a place near Matera. Later, the then leader of the Communist Party, Palmiro Togliatti, came to see for himself. From him comes the expression “shame of Italy”.
In the early 1950s, Christian Democrat Prime Minister Alcide De Gasperi ordered the eviction of Sassi. For their inhabitants, a housing estate called La Martella was built outside the city, which at that time was considered to be particularly progressive. But not all inhabitants of the cave settlements were pleased about it, some refused to change. Today, La Martella looks rather lifeless, unlike the Sassi. “As if the cave settlements do not need any inhabitants to live on, while the social buildings go without maintenance”, as can be read in the inspiring publication by the Viennese art publisher Schlebrügge “History does not repeat, but it rhymes”. An interesting alternative to the traditional travel guides, albeit large format. It was created, as a result of a time-limited laboratory set up in 2016 by the Art University Linz in Matera. It’s not about sights common, but how the title, a quote from Mark Twain, already hints to a search for clues of a very special kind.
No new Disneyland, please!
After visiting Matera itself, you would be inclined not to write about it. Not because the visit would not be worth it, quite the contrary. There is probably no other place on earth where the history of human settlements is so clear. On one side the high plateau with the caves from the Neolithic. On the opposite side, the rock churches and rock sites diced by humans. Above it, the Civita and the Baroque old town, “but their buildings of the Gravina show their backs,” explains the city guide Cinzia. “For the following reason: The bourgeoisie at that time wanted to distinguish themselves from the poor people, that is, the inhabitants of the caves.”
The temptation not to speak of Matera has much more to do with the desire to protect the City of Stones from the onrush of visitors, to protect them from “disneying”. So that the Sassi do not count as a profit pit, but as a unique testimony of a lost civilization, as the UNESCO once wrote.