Matera Culture

Matera's culture is shaped by rock, by poverty remembered, and lately by a great deal of attention.

The rock churches

More than a hundred chiese rupestri are cut into the gorge and the plateau opposite, dug and painted between roughly the eighth and the thirteenth centuries. Many hold Byzantine-influenced frescoes. The Cripta del Peccato Originale, with its ninth-century cycle of Genesis scenes, is the finest and is sometimes called the Sistine Chapel of rupestrian art — a large claim, but the paintings are extraordinary.

Matera on film

The Sassi have stood in for Jerusalem repeatedly: Pasolini's Gospel According to St Matthew in 1964, Gibson's The Passion of the Christ in 2004, and a remake of Ben-Hur. The opening of the Bond film No Time to Die was shot here too. Locals have mixed feelings about a town whose main export image is somewhere else entirely.

Bread

Pane di Matera has protected status: a tall, cracked, dark-crusted loaf of durum wheat that keeps for a week, which is precisely what it was for. Alongside it, peperoni cruschi — sweet peppers dried and flash-fried until they shatter — and cardoncelli mushrooms from the Murgia.

The two museums

The Ridola archaeological museum holds the prehistoric material from the Murgia and is the place to understand how deep the occupation of this landscape goes. Palazzo Lanfranchi, the regional museum, holds the paintings, and the pairing is deliberate: one building for what was dug up, one for what was made of it.

Carlo Levi

The book that shamed Italy into acting is still the lens through which the country sees Basilicata, and the National Museum holds Levi's enormous painted mural of the region.