A look at Matera's Sassi
Matera is a medium sized town in Basilicata, in Italy's deepest South.
When you look in the map it appears to be remote from any usual destination, but after all it's only five ours car driving from Rome and about three from Naples.
All the site of the ancient settlement, called "i Sassi" (it's to say "the Stones"), has recently been included in the Unesco World Heritage List.
The settlement, partly excavated in a pale yellow tufaceous stone, partly sculpted and built with the same stone, spreads all over one of two the sides of the valley (called "gravina") of a small river.
On the other side of the "gravina" you still can see very ancient caves that where in use in prehistoric eras.
The site as been built, re-built and in use all the time since pre-Roman eras to the after last war period, when, in the Fifties, the authorities decided to move its inhabitants in modern houses expressly built for them and designed by the best Italian architects of that moment. And these ones are still in good conditions and of good architectural quality.
But now most of the privately owned houses in the Sassi are undergoing reconstruction, considered very fashionable by singles and young couples and sold at very high price (up to 4000 Eu per sq. mt.).
Anything built in the area is made of the same stone, so that it's impossible to distinguish a modern addition from an old building refreshed. Rumour has it that someone, eluding the strict surveillance, goes on excavating to create new spaces ...
In the meantime the municipality is working hard to make a great museum, or, better to say, a sort of museum city with all the rest of the site.
The complex, with its many rocky pre-Romanesque churches, small village units, baroque churches and great monasteries, little peasant houses carved in the tufaceous stone, is something absolutely fascinating and quite impossible to describe, so we hope you'll get at least a pale idea of it from our photos.
Moreover, if you go there you'll discover that the today Matera as well is a charming town, of refined culture, with kind and sociable inhabitants, original and varied cooking, delicious comfortable hotels, attractive ice cream and cake shops, museums with rare Magna Graecia pieces of ceramics to see, a place where it's surely worthy going for more than a one day trip.
