Matera historical timeline

Matera's history is unusually continuous and then, in the middle of the twentieth century, unusually violent in its interruption.

Very old

The caves of the gravina were occupied in the Palaeolithic, and occupation has never entirely stopped since. That makes Matera one of the longest continuously inhabited places anywhere, and the claim is better supported here than in most towns that make it.

Byzantine and after

Monks arriving from the east between the eighth and thirteenth centuries cut and frescoed the rock churches that give the area its character. The town passed through Lombard, Byzantine, Norman and Aragonese hands, and from 1663 to 1806 it was the administrative capital of Basilicata.

La vergogna nazionale

By the twentieth century the Sassi held a population far beyond what they could support. Families shared single caves with their animals; there was no sewerage; malaria and infant mortality were severe. Carlo Levi's Christ Stopped at Eboli, published in 1945, described it, and in 1950 the prime minister De Gasperi visited and called it a national disgrace.

A law of 1952 ordered the Sassi cleared. Around fifteen thousand people were moved into new districts built on the plateau. The caves were emptied, sealed and left. The Sassi were not abandoned by choice; they were evacuated by the state, and the memory of that is still close to the surface here.

Return

Restoration began in the 1980s, UNESCO inscribed the Sassi in 1993, and Matera was European Capital of Culture in 2019.