Sassi di Matera

Matera is flanked by the hillside Sassi, a peasant neighbourhood of cave houses.
They are considered (by tour guides at least,) to be the longest-occupied cave dwellings in the Earth’s history,continuously inhabited since at least 7,000 BCE. A 150,000-year-old hominid skeleton was found in one cave, along with Neolithic tools. The Ancient Romans, Greeks, Byzantines, and many others left their marks. The settlement has been around as long as Fertile Crescent cities like Aleppo and Jerusalem, and so has been used as the set for films like The Passion of the Christ and Ben-Hur.
Carlo Levis's sister passed through Matera on her way to visit him. This is what she told her brother:
"I didn't know this part of the country, to be sure," she answered, "but I did somehow picture it in my mind. Only Matera . . . Well, it was beyond anything I could possibly have imagined. I got there at about eleven in the morning. I had read in the guidebook that it was a picturesque town, quite worth a visit, that it had a museum of ancient art and some curious cave dwellings. But when I came out of the railway station, a modern and rather sumptuous affair, and looked around me, I couldn't for the life of me see the town; it simply wasn't there. I was on a sort of deserted plateau, surrounded by bare, low hills of a grayish earth covered with stones. In the middle of this desert there rose here and there eight or ten big marble buildings built in the style made fashionable in Rome by Piacentini, with massive doors, ornate architraves, solemn Latin inscriptions, and pillars gleaming in the sun. Some of them were unfinished and seemed to be quite empty, monstrosities entirely out of keeping with the desolate landscape around them. A jerry-built housing project, for the benefit, no doubt, of government employees, which had already fallen into a state of filth and disrepair, filled up the empty space around the buildings and shut off my view on one side. The whole thing looked like an ambitious bit of city planning, begun in haste and interrupted by the plague, or else like a stage set, in execrable taste, for a tragedy by d'Annunzio. These enormous twentieth-century imperial palaces housed the prefecture, the police station, the post office, the town hall, the barracks of the carabinieri, the Fascist Party headquarters, the Fascist Scouts, the Corporations, and so on. But where was the town? Matera was nowhere to be seen,
" ... ... I wanted to buy you a stethoscope as I had forgotten to bring one from Turin and I knew that you needed one for your medical practice. Since there were no dealers in medical instruments I decided to look for one in a pharmacy. Among the government buildings and the cheap new houses I found two pharmacies, the only ones, I was told, in the town. Neither had what I was looking for and what's more their proprietors disclaimed all knowledge of what it might be. 'A stethoscope? What's that?' After I had explained that it was a simple instrument for listening to the heart, made like an ear trumpet, usually out of wood, they told me that I might find such a thing in Bari, but that here in Matera no one had ever heard of it.
"By now it was noon and I repaired to the restaurant that was pointed out to me as the best in town. There, all at one table with a soiled cloth on it and napkin rings that showed they came there every day, sat the assistant chief of police with several of his subordinates, looking bored to tears. You know that I'm not hard to please, but I swear that when I got up to leave I was just as hungry as when I came.
"I set out at last to find the town. A little beyond the station I found a street with a row of houses on one side and on the other a deep gully. In the gully lay Matera. From where I was, higher up, it could hardly be seen because the drop was so sheer. All I could distinguish as I looked down were alleys and terraces, which concealed the houses from view. Straight across from me there was a barren hill of an ugly gray color, without a single tree or sign of cultivation upon it, nothing but sun-baked earth and stones. At the bottom of the gully a sickly, swampy stream, the Bradano, trickled among the rocks. The hill and the stream had a gloomy, evil appearance that caught at my heart. The gully had a strange shape: it was formed by two half-funnels, side by side, separated by a narrow spur and meeting at the bottom, where I could see a white church, Santa Maria de Idris, which looked half-sunk in the ground. The two funnels, I learned, were called Sasso Caveoso and Sasso Barisano. They were like a schoolboy's idea of Dante's Inferno. And, like Dante, I too began to go down from circle to circle, by a sort of mule path leading to the bottom. The narrow path wound its way down and around, passing over the roofs of the houses, if houses they could be called. They were caves, dug into the hardened clay walls of the gully, each with its own facade, some of which were quite handsome, with eighteenth-century ornamentation. These false fronts, because of the slope of the gully, were flat against its side at the bottom, but at the top they protruded, and the alleys in the narrow space between them and the hillside did double service: they were a roadway for those who came out of their houses from above and a roof for those who lived beneath. The houses were open on account of the heat, and as I went by I could see into the caves, whose only light came in through the front doors.
"Some of them had no entrance but a trapdoor and ladder. In these dark holes with walls cut out of the earth I saw a few pieces of miserable furniture, beds, and some ragged clothes hanging up to dry. On the floor lays dogs, sheep, goats, and pigs. Most families have just one cave to live in and there they sleep all together; men, women, children, and animals. This is how twenty thousand people live.
"Of children I saw an infinite number. They appeared from everywhere, in the dust and heat, amid the flies, stark naked or clothed in rags; I have never in all my life seen such a picture of poverty. My profession has brought me in daily contact with dozens of poor, sick, ill-kempt children, but I never even dreamed of seeing a sight like this. I saw children sitting on the doorsteps, in the dirt, while the sun beat down on them, with their eyes half-closed and their eyelids red and swollen; flies crawled across the lids, but the children stayed quite still, without raising a hand to brush them away. Yes, flies crawled across their eyelids, and they seemed not even to feel them. They had trachoma. I knew that it existed in the South, but to see it against this background of poverty and dirt was something else again. I saw other children with the wizened faces of old men, their bodies reduced by starvation almost to skeletons, their heads crawling with lice and covered with scabs. Most of them had enormous, dilated stomachs and faces yellow and worn with malaria.
"The women, when they saw me look in the doors, asked me to come in, and in the dark, smelly caves where they lived I saw children lying on the floor under torn blankets, with their teeth chattering from fever. Others, reduced to skin and bones by dysentery, could hardly drag themselves about. I saw children with waxen faces who seemed to me to have something worse than malaria, perhaps some tropical disease such as Kaia Azar, or black fever. The thin women, with dirty, undernourished babies hanging at their flaccid breasts, spoke to me mildly and with despair. I felt, under the blinding sun, as If I were in a city stricken by the plague. I went on down toward the church at the bottom of the gully; a constantly swelling crowd of children followed a few steps behind me. They were shouting something, but I could not understand their incomprehensible dialect. I kept on going; still they followed and called after me. I thought they must want pennies, and I stopped for a minute. Only then did I make out the words they were all shouting together: Signorina, give me some quinine! I gave them what coins I had with me to buy candy, but that was not what they wanted; they kept on asking, with sorrowful insistence, for quinine. Meanwhile we had reached Santa Maria de Idris, a handsome baroque church. When I lifted nay eyes to see the way I had come, I at last saw the whole of Matera, in the form of a slanting wall. From here it seemed almost like a real town. The facades of the caves were like a row of white houses; the holes of the doorways stared at me like black eyes. The town is indeed a beautiful one, picturesque and striking. I reached the museum with its Greek vases, statuettes, and coins found in the vicinity. While I was looking at them the children still stood out in the sun, waiting for me to bring them quinine."
Soon after her visit, and embarassed Italian government evicted the tenants, who were mostly Albanian refugees, and sealed the entrances with locked metal doors that remain to this day.
Fortunately, the plan to dynamite the hillside was abandoned when the extent and age of previous inhabitants was understood.Leggi altro