Italy’s Ancient Cave City: How a Forgotten Ruin Became a UNESCO Treasure

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Carved into the ravines of southern Italy, Matera is a city that seems to have grown from the rock itself. Its stone dwellings — the Sassi — date back some 9,000 years, making this one of the world’s oldest continuously inhabited settlements. Yet for decades, this extraordinary place was kept largely out of sight, its story untold.

How it returned to the world’s attention is one of Italy’s most remarkable turnarounds — and one of its most moving stories.

A City Carved From Stone

The Sassi di Matera fill two ancient ravines — the Sasso Caveoso and Sasso Barisano — with tier upon tier of cave dwellings, churches, and cisterns cut directly into pale limestone. From a distance, it is almost impossible to tell where the rock ends and the buildings begin.

What looks like a simple facade is often the front face of a home dug deep into the hillside. Windows and doors open straight into the earth. Narrow lanes twist between carved steps worn smooth over millennia.

The whole city is a living geological record — not built upon history, but built out of it.

Life Inside the Caves

Until the mid-20th century, thousands of Matera’s residents still lived in the Sassi exactly as their ancestors had for generations. Families shared a single cave room with their animals — a donkey might sleep alongside children, providing shared warmth against the cold stone walls.

Water was precious here. The Sassi were engineered with an extraordinary network of cisterns and drainage channels, a sophisticated system carved into the rock centuries before modern plumbing existed. Every drop of rain was collected, filtered through limestone, and stored below.

Carlo Levi’s 1945 memoir Christ Stopped at Eboli brought national attention to the poverty of the rural south, and Matera became a symbol of what postwar Italy had left behind. By the late 1950s, some 15,000 residents had been relocated from the Sassi into modern housing on the plateau above.

From Abandoned to UNESCO World Heritage Site

For years, the Sassi sat largely empty — too complex to demolish, too historically significant to ignore. Gradually, archaeologists, architects, and artists began moving in. The caves were cleaned, stabilised, and reimagined.

In 1993, UNESCO designated the Sassi di Matera a World Heritage Site, recognising them as “an outstanding example of a troglodyte settlement.” It was a remarkable reversal of fortune for a city the world had forgotten.

By 2019, when Matera was named a European Capital of Culture, this once-overlooked cave city had become one of Italy’s most compelling destinations. If you have ever searched for hidden gems in Italy, Matera belongs at the very top of that list.

What Matera Feels Like Today

Walking through the Sassi today is quietly overwhelming. At dusk, the pale stone glows amber and gold. Restaurants have been carved into caves. Hotels offer rooms cut directly from the rock, with modern comforts tucked inside ancient walls. Churches contain extraordinary frescoed interiors, still vivid after centuries of use.

The silence is striking. Unlike the bustle of Rome or Florence, Matera has a contemplative hush — the kind of stillness that settles when a place has been watching the world change for nine thousand years.

Film crews have noticed, too. Fans of the Bond franchise will recognise the labyrinthine stone streets: the opening sequences of No Time to Die were shot here in 2019, the cave city providing a backdrop that no studio could replicate.

Planning Your Visit

Matera sits in the region of Basilicata, roughly 65 kilometres from Bari in Puglia. It is not always the first destination on an Italy itinerary — and that is precisely what makes it so rewarding. Those who make the journey rarely leave disappointed.

Allow at least two full days: one to walk the upper town and explore the Sasso Barisano, another to descend into the Sasso Caveoso and discover its rupestrian churches. If you are building a wider southern Italy route, Matera pairs beautifully with the small towns worth venturing off the beaten path for, many of which lie within easy reach.

For those planning the full trip, the guides and inspiration at lovetovisititaly.com are worth a browse before you book — the south of Italy repays careful planning.

There is a particular kind of travel that changes how you think about time. Matera is that kind of place. Standing in the Sassi, with the ravine falling away before you and swallows cutting through the evening air, you get the feeling of having arrived somewhere that was always waiting to be found — by the world, and by you.

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