Matera Events

Matera's calendar is dominated by one extraordinary festival, with a strong Christmas season behind it.

La Festa della Bruna

Held on 2 July and unlike any other Italian feast. A papier-mâché triumphal cart, built over months by local artisans and carrying an image of the Madonna della Bruna, is paraded through the town — and then, at the end, deliberately torn to pieces by the crowd in Piazza Vittorio Veneto. Everyone takes a fragment home for luck. The cart is destroyed every year and a new one is built for the next. The day begins before dawn with the Procession of the Shepherds, carrying the image out to a country church; a body of horsemen known as the Knights of the Bruna escorts the cart through the day; and it ends with fireworks fired along the edge of the gravina, with the whole town watching from the opposite rim. The destruction is not vandalism but the point of the thing, and it is done at speed.

Christmas in the Sassi

A living nativity is staged among the caves in December, using the rock dwellings as the setting. It is the single most obvious use of this landscape and it draws large crowds, with the lanes lit and the caves used as the stable, the workshops and the inn.

Summer in the Murgia

Concerts and open-air performances use the gorge and the rock churches through July and August, a habit that survived the Capital of Culture year.

Holy Week

Processions wind through the Sassi after dark, and the setting does most of the work: torchlight on cut rock, in lanes that have not changed shape in centuries.