Francesco Cassiano de Silva, 1703
The oldest presence of man within the urban perimeter of Matera began to appear around three thousand years ago. In some areas of the Civita, Sassi and Piano districts there have been archaeological finds dating back to the Metal Age. Further archaeological stratifications in the same areas attest to the influence of the Magna Graecia and Roman cultures.
In the early Middle Ages Matera was conquered by the Lombards, then by the Arabs and finally by the Byzantines. Precisely in the period of the second Byzantine colonization of southern Italy, between the 9th and 11th centuries, cave farmhouses began to emerge, dug into the rocky sides of the numerous ravines of the Appulo-Lucan Murgia. The city of Matera was formed as an evolution of one of these predominantly cave farmhouses, which probably also had “normal” buildings or buildings which were “normally” built.
The excavation activity continued in subsequent periods, even up to the 16th and 17th centuries, as it happened in the Casalnuovo district, the extreme offshoot of Sasso Caveoso. The excavated architecture, defined negatively because it was obtained by the subtraction of material, could become commonly used thanks to the nature of the local rock, the calcarenite from Gravina, soft and easily modeled by man using simple work tools such as an ax and chisel.
Scholars have been questioning for several decades whether this medieval troglodytism was an original and indigenous phenomenon, or whether it was imported through migratory flows, which would have led to the adoption of housing habits typical of distant peoples.
Until now, in southern Italy there are no documentary sources attesting to cave dwellings before the Middle Ages, i.e. in the Magna Graecia and Roman periods.
As mentioned, in the early Middle Ages, in southern Italy, the Lombard domination was followed by the Byzantine domination (9th-11th century).
The Byzantines, who governed Puglia from the 9th to the 11th century, already knew the thermal benefits of living underground in many areas of their empire a thousand years before the conquest, and were experts in the creation of hydraulic systems for collecting rainwater, through a capillary network of channels dug into the rock, flowing into cisterns. By taking advantage of the steep natural slopes of the two valleys sloping below the Civita it was possible to collect rainwater in countless cisterns. These were scattered everywhere, in the neighborhoods, the small squares of the ancient districts, and underneath each house.
The spread of excavated architecture in the East is attested by the rock villages of Cappadocia, Georgia, Armenia, Crimea, Syria etc. as well as the splendid funerary architecture of Petra, Jordan. The birth of Jesus Christ in a cave in Bethlehem, Palestine, makes him the most famous troglodyte in the history of humanity (troglodyte: cave dweller). It is no coincidence that, precisely because of the similarity between Matera and Roman-era Palestine, Pier Paolo Pasolini was the first director who decided to set a film on the life of Christ in Matera, with The Gospel According to Matthew (1964).
After the Lombard and Byzantine domination, in the Norman period the city strengthened and expanded its defensive system.
Subsequently to the Angevin domination, the city of Matera became a fief and it was ceded to Count Giancarlo Tramontano during the dominion of the Aragonese noble family. The Count, particularly disliked by the citizens of Matera for his abuses and privileges, was blatantly killed by a handful of unknown assassins, after evening mass, as he left the Cathedral. For this reason, the fortress located above the city of Matera, the so-called Tramontano Castle, was never completed, and the street next to the Cathedral, where the brutal crime took place, is still called Via Riscatto today.
According to some scholars, the Latin motto, placed at the feet of the ox, depicted in the municipal coat of arms of the Municipality of Matera, refers to this episode. It reads: Bos lassus firmius figit pedem: the tired ox sinks its pace more slowly.
That is: the people of Matera would have the temper of an ox, being tireless and dignified workers, but certainly not willing to endure sacrifices beyond a reasonable measure!
It is curious to consider that at the time of the brutal crime, to commemorate the event, in the church of San Giovanni Battista, an anonymous chronicler felt the need to leave a piece of graffiti in Latin which can still be read today: DIE 29 DC (decembris) 15[.]5 INTERFECTVUS (est) COMES MA(therae).
In 1500, during the Kingdom of Naples, the Palazzo del Sedile was built, the seat of the government of the city, which continued to grow in the number of its inhabitants, just outside the walls of the Civita, in what is still today the Piazza del Sedile.
In the same period, the Schiavoni also arrived in Matera, immigrant populations of Albanian and Serbo-Croatian origin, who settled near the Malve district, in the Caveoso, giving rise to the Casalnuovo district, in which new cave dwellings continued to be excavated.
At the beginning of the modern age (probably already from the end of the Middle Ages) the physiognomy of the Sassi was changing: the ancient cave houses, directly dug into the rock, were increasingly replaced by palatial houses, no longer excavated but built by adding material. Furthermore, from Civita the defensive system was strengthening towards the Sassi.
For several centuries, various social classes coexisted in the Sassi, including the nobility. By now they tended to live in built houses, gradually allocating the excavated spaces to other uses, such as cellars, warehouses, stables and production activities.
Under Spanish rule, in 1663 Matera left the Terra d’Otranto which united it to the southern part of Puglia to become the seat of the Royal Audience and capital of the Basilicata region, a primacy it handed over to Potenza about a century and a half later (1806).
From the Baroque age until the beginning of the 19th century, Matera continued to expand on the plateau in front of the Civita, where the so-called Piano district was increasingly developing.
During the nineteenth century, and until the mid-twentieth century, the population continued to grow, especially that of the poorer social classes. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, poverty began to increase, especially due to the management of agriculture, based on the latifundium, which pushed farmers to move to the city. Thus it was that over the last one hundred and fifty years the balance between citizens and liveable space in the Sassi was exhausted, and conditions of overcrowding were progressively created. Driven by necessity, the poor large families of the laborers returned to live in the excavated environments, in the stables, in the cisterns, and also in some cave churches, previously abandoned by the religious orders, which had already moved to the Piano.
Between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, around eighteen thousand people lived in the Sassi, of which around four thousand in cave houses. Many inhabitants lived in extreme poverty and in promiscuity with farm animals, which were essential to their sustenance.
In 1935, the writer Carlo Levi, confined by the fascist regime in Grassano and Aliano, in the province of Matera, had the opportunity to get to know firsthand the bitter peasant reality of Southern Italy, the poverty and the hygienic-sanitary degradation in which they found themselves, at that time, the overcrowded Sassi neighborhoods. Here, the poorest were reduced to living in unhealthy, dark and damp cave-houses, shared with animals. Living with the mule, the goat, the chickens, the pig, the poor inhabitants simply needed to survive. In this situation, unfortunately, many people fell ill, so much so that in that period the infant mortality rate was very high, around 40 percent. In his novel Christ Stopped at Eboli, published about ten years later, in 1945, Levi dedicated four pages to Matera. His famous contribution was added to that of many other intellectuals and politicians of the time, who had the southern question at heart and the miserable living conditions of agricultural workers, which worsened after the unification of Italy and two world wars.
In the 1950s Matera was considered a real national and international political media matter. Palmiro Togliatti was the first to denounce in 1948 the living conditions of Matera’s farmers, who lived in the overcrowded Sassi neighborhoods, in precarious hygienic conditions. Many American journalists, in their articles and documentaries on Matera, beneficiary of the Marshall Plan, slavishly repeated the gross historical error already committed by Carlo Levi in his novel, reporting that the poor inhabitants of Matera still lived in the same caves that they had occupied since the Paleolithic.
In this particular context the Italian State issued the so-called first special law regarding Matera, launched by the De Gasperi government in 1952 (Law 17 May 1952 n. 619).
Originally, it only envisaged the recovery of the Sassi, but, in reality, it caused their emptying and abandonment. The cave houses, declared by law uninhabitable, were abandoned, but also the built ones, which were the majority. Approximately eighty percent of the properties were expropriated from state property, so much so that the historic center of Matera, truly unique in Europe, still belongs to state property.
With this law, the State took on the burden of building new working-class neighborhoods for the displaced people of the Sassi and Civita districts. Only the inhabitants of the Piano area remained in their homes. Consequently, within about a decade, the ancient districts were emptied and became a sort of ghost neighborhoods, ruined and dilapidated. The city thus experienced a sort of collective removal of its historical and cultural memory, of total denial of its past.
In the 1980s, the question of the abandoned historic center was still unresolved: some would have preferred to leave it empty, as a sort of enormous monument to memory, while others hoped for its repopulation. This second hypothesis prevailed and so in 1986 the Italian State issued a second special law (Law 11 November 1986, n. 771). It financed the rehabilitation of the Sassi neighbourhoods, establishing that the recovery could take place thanks to the entrustment of state-owned properties to private citizens of Matera, through the legal formula of granting free loan for use. According to this law, private assignees must carry out the conservative restoration of the same properties at their own expense. In fact, the two state laws have allowed the historic center of Matera to return to being lived in, and the rehabilitation of the ancient districts is still underway.
Finally, Matera managed to redeem its tormented past of poverty, common to other Italian and foreign locations in the post-war period, to once again bet on a bright future. In 1993 the Sassi districts were proclaimed a World Heritage Site by UNESCO and in 2007 the Murgia Matera Park was included in the name of the same UNESCO site. Furthermore, in 2014 Matera was proclaimed European Capital of Culture for 2019. This has finally led the city to enjoy undisputed well-being, thanks to the great growth in its tourism development.
