Italy Called Matera a National Disgrace. Now the World Can’t Get Enough.

Sharing is caring!

In 1948, Italy’s prime minister stood before parliament and called Matera “the shame of Italy.” Thousands of people were living in ancient cave homes carved into a limestone ravine — without running water, electricity, or sanitation. Children and livestock shared the same rooms. The government was horrified. Within four years, the sassi were emptied by force.

Today, those same caves are boutique hotels, candlelit restaurants, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Matera is one of the most visited cities in southern Italy, and people travel from across the world to sleep in the rooms the government once tried to erase.

A City Older Than Time

Matera sits in Basilicata, the instep of Italy’s boot — a region most travellers skip entirely. That invisibility is part of its power. The city grew not upward but inward, cut into the soft limestone cliffs of a ravine called the Gravina. People have been living in these caves for at least 9,000 years, making Matera one of the oldest continuously inhabited settlements on earth.

The sassi — the word simply means “stones” — are two distinct neighbourhoods carved into the cliff face. Sasso Caveoso and Sasso Barisano cascade down the ravine like a stone waterfall, each building growing from and into the rock around it. The effect is extraordinary: an entire city that looks as though it was pulled from the earth rather than built upon it.

Life Inside the Caves

Before the evacuation, roughly 15,000 people lived in the sassi. Families occupied caves that had been home to generations before them. The front rooms were living quarters. The back rooms, carved deeper into the rock, housed the animals. The temperature stayed cool in summer — practical in the southern heat — but ventilation was almost nonexistent.

The government’s decision to clear the sassi was not entirely wrong. Disease was rampant and infant mortality catastrophic. Writer Carlo Levi had already documented the poverty of Basilicata in his 1945 novel Christ Stopped at Eboli, and the national conscience could no longer look away.

But the evacuation was brutal in its speed. Families were moved to new housing on the plateau above the ravine — concrete blocks, built quickly, with none of the warmth or community the sassi had given them for centuries. Many residents never stopped thinking of the caves as home.

The Shame That Became a Treasure

The empty sassi became a ghost city. For decades, almost nothing happened. Then slowly, the story shifted. Filmmakers discovered what the locals had always known. Pier Paolo Pasolini shot parts of The Gospel According to St Matthew here in 1964. Mel Gibson filmed The Passion of the Christ in Matera in 2004, using its ancient lanes as the streets of Jerusalem. The city’s timelessness was exactly what the world needed.

In 1993, UNESCO added the sassi to its World Heritage List. Not as a monument to poverty, but as a remarkable example of human ingenuity — a city built from and within the natural landscape, adapted and refined across millennia. Italy, slowly, began to agree.

Enjoying this? 30,000 Italy lovers get stories like this every week. Subscribe free →

The City Reinvented

Today, the former caves hold everything from small family restaurants to luxury hotels with stone walls and cave baths. The residents who were removed came back — or their children did. Restoration projects have turned crumbling chambers into gallery spaces and performance venues.

Walking the sassi now, it is hard to imagine the silence that fell after the evacuation. The lanes are busy again, lined with ceramics shops, wine bars, and breakfast spots where you can eat under a vaulted ceiling that has been above someone’s head for thousands of years.

The families who once lived here often say the same thing. The sassi were not just shelter. They were community, identity, memory. Moving to the plateau above meant running water and modern comforts, but it also meant losing something wordless and irreplaceable.

What to Expect When You Visit

Matera rewards slow travel. The sassi are best explored on foot — in the early morning before the tour groups arrive, or in the evening when golden light fills the ravine and the stone glows amber. The cathedral, built directly into the cliff and looming above Sasso Barisano, is one of southern Italy’s most quietly beautiful buildings.

If your budget allows, staying inside a sassi cave hotel overnight changes the experience entirely. Waking in a space that humans have sheltered in since before recorded history is one of those moments that stays with you long after you return home.

For travellers moving through southern Italy, Matera pairs beautifully with Alberobello’s extraordinary trulli — another UNESCO site built from stone in ways that seem to defy expectation. And if ancient daily life fascinates you, the hidden world inside Pompeii offers another window into how ordinary Italians once actually lived.

Italy has an extraordinary gift for turning shame into pride. Matera was once hidden, denied, considered a problem to be solved. The government’s answer was to move the people out and close the door. Instead, the world walked in. And the caves, patient and unmovable as the limestone they were carved from, were still there — waiting, as they had been for nine thousand years.

You Might Also Enjoy

• Why Every House in Alberobello Was Originally Built to Be Demolished
• The Ordinary Life Hidden Inside Pompeii That Most Tourists Never See
• Why Frederick II Built an Octagonal Castle Nobody Can Explain

Plan Your Italy Trip

Ready to explore southern Italy? Our Ultimate Italy Travel Guide covers everything from how to get there to where to stay, eat, and what not to miss — region by region.

Sharing is caring!