Matera, Italy - Italy has many places that make you feel you are on a movie set – the Trevi Fountain in Rome, the Amalfi Coast near Naples and Venice’s lagoons are but a few.
But there is one place in particular that for film-makers and visitors evokes early Christian and even prehistoric times, and that is Matera, off the tourist map in the southern region of Basilicata, part of “the boot” of Italy.
With its “Sassi” limestone cave dwellings dug into the hillside and cascading in gravity-defying fashion down a steep slope towards the Gravina River, Matera is one of the Italian cities that time forgot.
Those who have sought it out include film directors and tourists looking for something different – such as staying in one of the Sassi caves. Unesco has named Matera a European cultural capital for 2019, which should bring many more visitors to one of Italy’s poorest areas.
Bypassed by development in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and described by Carlo Levi as one of the most backward places in Italy in his famous 1945 book Christ Stopped at Eboli, Matera remained so primitive until recent decades that it made the perfect stand-in for ancient Jerusalem.
Pier Paolo Pasolini filmed his groundbreaking The Gospel According to St Matthew (1964), depicting Jesus as a proto-communist, in Matera. Mel Gibson used it for his The Passion of the Christ, showing Jesus’s torture on the way to Calvary and inspiring the popular Trattoria Lucana on Matera’s main road, the Via Lucana (www.trattorialucana.it). It has also been the setting for a remake of Ben Hur.
Matera is two places in one – a thriving, modern city with restaurants, hotels, shops and museums tucked higher up the plateau from the Sassi caves, which have been inhabited since prehistoric times – by some accounts for 9 000 years.
Until fascist leader Mussolini’s rise to power in the 1930s, the caves didn’t have electricity but were teeming with people who kept their livestock indoors. After the war, social planners moved the inhabitants and many – perhaps most – of the Sassi were left vacant.
Today internet-savvy entrepreneurs, restaurateurs and hoteliers have turned some of the Sassi into luxury digs or workplaces.
Hotel Sassi (www.hotelsassi.it) is described as being one of the first of the renovators. Its website says guests “will enjoy the view and tranquillity of the Sassi – you can see the twirl of the lesser kestrel, a bird of particular rarity”. Rates start at e70 (R950) for a single room, rising to e160 for a junior suite.
Conventional accommodation is offered by the Hotel San Domenico (www.hotelsandomenico.it) on the Via Roma, a short walk to the Piazza Vittorio Veneto where residents congregate on warm nights.
On the square, the salumeria or deli il Buongustaio Matera stocks Italian delicacies, while the Kappador restaurant has decent food and a spectacular view of the Sassi and the ravine (www.kappador.it).
It would be easy to spend an entire holiday in Matera, but that would be a mistake. A drive 50km south takes you to the ruins of the ancient Greek settlement of Metaponto, including a temple to Hera, wife and sister of Zeus, and a superb archaeological museum.
Make time for a tour – at e8 a person – of The Crypt of the Original Sin, sometimes described as the “Sistine Chapel” of the region’s “rupestrian” or rock cave churches (www.cryptoforiginalsin.it). The 9th-century monks who painted it were no Michelangelos, but the Eve emerging from Adam’s rib leaves little to the imagination about why the original sin happened.
Michael Roddy, Reuters