Maratea historical timeline

Maratea's history is a slow migration downhill, from a fortified summit to the coast.

San Biagio

The town's founding story is the arrival of the relics of Saint Blaise, bishop of Sebaste in Armenia, said to have reached this coast by ship in the eighth century when the vessel carrying them would not leave the bay. A basilica on Monte San Biagio has held them since. He is the patron, and the feast built around him is still the biggest event of the year.

The upper town

Medieval Maratea was Maratea Superiore, a walled settlement on the mountain beside the basilica, defensible and far from raiders. As the danger from the sea receded, people moved down to the more convenient slope below, and the upper town was gradually abandoned. Its ruins are still there, roofless and overgrown, next to the statue.

1806

The town held out against French troops during the Napoleonic campaign in the south and was besieged and taken, an episode still remembered locally.

The Redeemer

In 1965 a statue of Christ the Redeemer, about twenty-one metres tall, was raised on the summit, carved in Carrara marble by the Florentine sculptor Bruno Innocenti and paid for by Stefano Rivetti, a textile industrialist from Biella in the north who had settled here and who drove much of the town's post-war development. Unusually, it faces inland rather than out to sea, looking towards the basilica behind it.

Rivetti's Maratea

Much of what Maratea is now dates from one man's decisions. From the late 1950s Rivetti bought land, opened hotels, funded the statue and pushed the town towards a small, high-end tourism rather than volume building. His business later collapsed, but the model he set, and the coastline he did not allow to be developed, outlasted him.

Modern

Tourism developed from the 1960s deliberately slowly and at the upper end, and Maratea remains small and largely unbuilt compared with the coasts on either side.