How Was Maratea Built

Maratea is built on a gradient, and everything about its fabric follows from that.

The borgo

The medieval centre is dense, vertical and made of local limestone, rendered and painted. Lanes run along the contours and are joined by stepped alleys cutting up the slope; small squares open where the ground allows. Houses share walls and stack on each other, with the roof of one at the level of the doorstep of the next. It is a plan produced entirely by the terrain rather than by any design.

Maratea Superiore

The abandoned upper town is the same idea, four centuries older and left to fall down: walls, house plots, cisterns and a street pattern still legible among the scrub on the summit ridge. It is the rare case of a medieval settlement that was neither destroyed nor rebuilt over, simply walked away from.

The statue

The Redeemer is carved in Carrara marble chips set in white cement over a concrete core, about twenty-one metres tall with an arm span nearly as wide. It was made in sections and assembled on the summit in 1965. The face is stylised and severe, quite unlike the Rio figure it is inevitably compared with.

Terraces and the harbour

Every workable slope was terraced in dry stone for olives, vines and lemons, and the walls are still there under the scrub on hillsides nobody has farmed in fifty years. The harbour below the town is small and largely twentieth-century; before it, boats were simply hauled up onto the shingle of the coves.

The coast road

The SS18 along the cliffs is a work of mid-twentieth-century engineering in its own right: viaducts, tunnels and retaining walls carrying a road across a face that had no route along it before.