The stone city that went from national shame to one of Europe’s great symbols of rebirth
Matera does not look like a city that was built. It looks like a city that emerged from the earth. Houses, churches, stairs, courtyards and caves seem to grow from the pale limestone of the ravine, so closely joined to the landscape that it is difficult to decide where geology ends and architecture begins. This is the first thing that makes Matera extraordinary. The second is its history. Few European cities have experienced such a dramatic reversal of fortune: from an ancient settlement inhabited for millennia, to a symbol of desperate poverty in the twentieth century, to a UNESCO World Heritage Site and European Capital of Culture. Matera’s beauty is not the easy beauty of a place designed to impress. It is the beauty of endurance.
Human occupation in the Matera area reaches back to prehistoric times. Natural caves in the limestone landscape offered shelter long before anything resembling an organized city existed. Over centuries, people enlarged those caves, cut rooms into the rock, built façades in front of them and created an extraordinary system of settlement adapted to the steep ravines known locally as gravine. UNESCO describes the Sassi and the Park of the Rupestrian Churches as a landscape showing human occupation over several millennia. This is not marketing exaggeration. Matera is one of those rare places where the history of human habitation can be read almost as geology, layer beneath layer.
The ancient city grew around the Civita, the higher ridge between the two principal Sassi districts: Sasso Caveoso and Sasso Barisano. Over time, defensive walls, churches and houses turned a collection of caves into a complex urban organism. The early medieval centuries brought Lombard, Byzantine and later Norman influences to Basilicata, a frontier region where powers shifted frequently. Matera became part of the Norman and then Swabian political world of southern Italy, and in the thirteenth century the Cathedral rose on the Civita, an imposing Romanesque building dedicated to the Madonna della Bruna and Saint Eustace. From its position above the Sassi, it still appears to preside over a city that seems to descend into the rock beneath it.
What makes the Sassi remarkable is not simply that people lived in caves. Cave dwelling exists in many parts of the Mediterranean. Matera developed an entire urban system in which houses, cisterns, churches, streets and agricultural spaces were integrated into a difficult environment. Rainwater was collected with extraordinary ingenuity through channels and underground reservoirs. Courtyards known as vicinati became shared social spaces where families lived in close proximity, exchanging work, food, gossip and the unavoidable details of one another’s lives. In a landscape where survival depended on cooperation, architecture became social organization.
The rock churches are among Matera’s greatest treasures. Monks, hermits and local communities carved chapels directly into the limestone, creating sacred interiors that were sometimes decorated with frescoes. Santa Maria de Idris, perched dramatically on a rocky spur, is one of the most recognizable. Other churches and monastic spaces spread across the Sassi and the opposite Murgia plateau. Their simplicity can be deceptive. These were places where Byzantine, Latin and local devotional traditions met, and where stone was transformed from landscape into sanctuary with remarkably few materials beyond faith, labor and patience.
Matera’s later history followed the broader fortunes of southern Italy under Angevin, Aragonese, Spanish and Bourbon rule. Noble palaces and Baroque churches appeared in the upper city, especially along the Piano, while the Sassi continued to house much of the poorer population. This vertical social geography became increasingly severe. By the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, overcrowding, poor sanitation, malaria and extreme poverty had turned the ancient cave districts into places of great human hardship. Families often shared small spaces with animals. Water systems that had once been ingenious adaptations to the environment were no longer sufficient for a population living in difficult modern conditions.
The crisis came to national attention in the twentieth century, especially after writers, political figures and investigators described the living conditions in the Sassi. Matera became associated with the expression ‘national shame’, a phrase that captured how shocking it seemed that such poverty could exist in postwar Italy. In 1952 the Italian state passed a law that led to the relocation of thousands of residents from the Sassi into newly built neighborhoods. The aim was to improve health and housing conditions, and from that point the old districts began to empty. For many families, leaving the Sassi meant relief from hardship. It also meant being separated from a social world built over generations. Modernization solved real problems but also broke old forms of community.
For several decades, the Sassi seemed destined to remain an abandoned monument to poverty. Then the interpretation began to change. Scholars, residents, architects and cultural activists argued that the old districts were not merely slums but an extraordinary historical environment deserving preservation. Restoration projects began. Houses became homes again, as well as workshops, small hotels, restaurants and cultural spaces. In 1993 the Sassi and the Park of the Rupestrian Churches were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. The designation recognized precisely what earlier generations had failed to value: the unique integration of human settlement, architecture and landscape.
Matera’s international transformation accelerated dramatically in the twenty-first century. In 2019 it became a European Capital of Culture, sharing the title with Plovdiv in Bulgaria. For a city once held up as proof of Italy’s failure to modernize, the symbolism was extraordinary. Culture had not erased the memory of poverty; it had reinterpreted it. Matera became a European example of how neglected heritage could become a foundation for renewal. The transformation was not without tension, of course. Success brought rising tourism, new businesses and the risk that a city once emptied by policy might now be emptied by short-term accommodation. Matera’s modern challenge is to remain a living city rather than becoming a spectacular hotel with churches attached.
Cinema has also helped shape the world’s image of Matera. Its archaic landscape has often stood in for biblical settings, most famously in films about the life of Christ. Pier Paolo Pasolini filmed The Gospel According to St. Matthew here in the 1960s, and later international productions used the Sassi for similar reasons. More recently, Matera appeared in major global productions including the James Bond film No Time to Die. This has created a curious double identity: Matera is both intensely local and instantly usable as somewhere outside ordinary time. Few cities can convincingly play ancient Jerusalem in the morning and host a contemporary cocktail bar in a cave by evening.
The cuisine of Matera is rooted in Basilicata’s agricultural traditions and in the frugality of a population accustomed to making much from little. The famous bread of Matera, with its large form and thick crust, is central to local identity. Cialledda combines bread with vegetables in simple preparations that reflect a culture in which nothing useful was wasted. Crapiata, a dish of legumes and grains traditionally associated with communal celebration, speaks directly to peasant life. Peperoni cruschi, the crisp dried peppers so closely linked to Basilicata, add color and flavor to pasta, vegetables and other dishes. Matera’s food is not luxurious in origin; it is intelligent. Like the city, it turns necessity into character.
The city’s most important festival, the Festa della Bruna on July 2, reveals another side of Matera. Dedicated to the Madonna della Bruna, the celebration culminates in the ritual destruction of an elaborate papier-mâché triumphal float. People tear it apart in a dramatic scramble for fragments believed to bring good fortune. To an outsider, it can look like a magnificent object has been carefully created for the sole purpose of being enthusiastically destroyed. That is exactly what happens, and it has happened for generations. The ritual says something essential about Matera: beauty here is not always preserved behind glass. Sometimes it is lived, shared and sacrificed.
Walking Matera requires a willingness to surrender to stairs. Roads become alleys, alleys become steps, roofs become paths, and what appears to be the ground floor of one house may be the roof of another. The Sasso Caveoso feels more rugged and visually dramatic, while the Sasso Barisano contains a denser mix of restored buildings and commercial activity. Above them, the Piano presents a different Matera of Baroque churches, civic streets and later urban development. Across the ravine, the Murgia plateau offers the essential view back toward the city. From there, Matera looks less like architecture than like an ancient organism clinging to stone.
What makes Matera different from every other major Italian destination is the moral complexity of its beauty. Visitors admire what earlier residents often experienced as hardship. Cave rooms that now command high hotel prices once held families living in poverty. This does not make tourism wrong, but it does make memory important. Matera is most powerful when the visitor understands both realities at once: the ingenuity of the settlement and the suffering that later existed within it. The city asks not only to be photographed, but to be understood.
Today Matera is one of southern Italy’s most compelling cultural destinations and a symbol of urban regeneration. It has museums, film festivals, cultural institutions, universities and a growing creative economy, yet its identity remains anchored in rock, water, labor and collective memory. Its story is not one of simple progress from darkness to light. It is the story of a city that changed the meaning of its own past.
If you have visited Matera, tell us what stayed with you most: the first view over the Sassi, the silence inside a rock church, the taste of Matera bread, the evening lights on the stone houses, or the realization that a place once abandoned could return as one of Italy’s most powerful stories of rebirth. Follow Made in Italy Stories to keep discovering Italy through the people, places and memories that shaped it. We tell you about Italy, as Italians.