Sassi of Matera

The city is famous above all for its "sassi", houses carved into the rock where, in ancient times, the population lived. Today part of these old houses are abandoned or house museums. Matera was the European Capital of Culture in 2019.

Matera is a city located on a rocky outcrop in Basilicata, in Southern Italy. It includes the area of the Sassi, a complex of cave houses dug into the mountain. Evacuated in 1952 due to poor living conditions, the Sassi now house museums such as the Casa Grotta di Vico Solitario, with period furniture and handcrafted tools. One of the nearby rupestrian churches is Santa Lucia alle Malve, with 13th century frescoes. Matera is one of the oldest cities in the world whose territory holds evidence of human settlements starting from the Paleolithic and without interruption up to the present day. It represents an extraordinary page written by man throughout the millennia of this very long history.

Matera is the city of the Sassi, the original urban nucleus, developed starting from the natural caves dug into the rock and subsequently modeled into increasingly complex structures within two large natural amphitheatres which are the Sasso Caveoso and the Sasso Barisano. Matera is a city with a fascinating and complex history: border city, of contrasts, of competition and fusion between different landscapes, civilizations, cultures. From the rock civilization to those of Byzantine and oriental matrix, to the advent of the Normans, the systematic attempt to reduce the rock city to the rules of the culture of the European city: from the Romanesque, to the Renaissance, to the Baroque, the last eight centuries of construction and finishing of the city have attempted to shape and overcome the natural resistance of the pre-existing rock habitat, resulting in architecture and urban arrangements of particular quality and originality.

Highly recommended to see, make sure to plan a stop here.