Matera: The City Nobody Wanted to Show

Picture a street where the windows are doorways into rock. The houses don't rise. They go down, into warm stone. This is Matera, in Basilicata, in the south of Italy. Its old district is called the Sassi, which simply means "the stones."

People settled here so long ago that nobody will name a starting date. It is one of the oldest continuously inhabited places on earth. Families were living in these caves before there were written languages to record it.

You might think cave life was just poverty, pushed underground. Italy had plenty of poor neighborhoods. But this was something harsher.

By the middle of the twentieth century, people, goats, sheep and donkeys slept in the same rooms. The animals were a peasant family's only warmth and only wealth. Keeping them somewhere else meant losing them. There was no running water and no sewage. Under the floor sat a cistern of rainwater, and it served people and livestock alike.

Doctors who came to Basilicata in those years wrote that ordinary illnesses hit the peasants far harder here than anywhere else in Italy. Basic sanitation simply didn't exist.

The writer Carlo Levi ended up in this region in exile under Mussolini. He later wrote a book called "Christ Stopped at Eboli." Of the caves he wrote: "Inside those black holes with earthen walls I saw beds, meager furnishings, rags hung up. On the floor lay dogs, sheep, goats, pigs."

The book came out in nineteen forty-five. After that, Matera could no longer be ignored.

In nineteen forty-eight, the politician Palmiro Togliatti came and used two words that stuck to the city for decades: "national disgrace." Two years later, the prime minister, Alcide De Gasperi, said almost the same thing. Two years after that, in nineteen fifty-two, he signed a special law. The state would move the people of the Sassi into new neighborhoods.

About seventeen thousand people had to leave the caves where their grandparents and great-grandparents were born. Some got apartments with running water. But with the water, many lost the life they knew. They lost work close to home. They lost neighbors on the other side of the wall. They lost the warmth of the animals on winter nights.

Some people wept, and not because they were leaving a slum. They wept because they were leaving home.

The Sassi emptied almost completely. For years the district stood dark and abandoned. Tourists were kept away from it, and locals walked around it.

Then, slowly, people came back. It began in the seventies, and it truly took hold in the eighties. This time it wasn't poverty that brought them. It was choice. First came artists and restorers, then people who opened hotels.

The stone that had been a brand of backwardness turned out to be the same stone as always. It was cool in summer and warm in winter, and it had stood for thousands of years.

In nineteen ninety-three, in Cartagena, Colombia, UNESCO added the Sassi and the rock churches around them to the World Heritage List. It was the first time the organization had described a place not just as a monument but as a whole "cultural landscape." And in two thousand nineteen, Matera became a European Capital of Culture. The city a prime minister was ashamed to show reporters was now inviting them in.

Maybe the most human part of this story isn't the architecture, or even the law. It's that shame and pride looked out of the very same windows, cut into the very same rock. The stone never changed. The way people looked at it did.

What should we tell you about? Your own street would do. moygid dot online.