Carlo Levi was right - Christ certainly stopped at Eboli!

Even as recently as the 1930s, 20,000 landless peasants were crammed into the Barisano and Caveoso sassi i.e the town’s two main stone cave districts. In­side the cave dwellings, large families lived alongside their live­stock, without electricity or running water. Children appeared stark naked or in rags. In such filthy conditions, disease (especially cholera) and malnutrition were rife; illiteracy was very high. New born babies often died. Even by the standards of Italy’s impoverished south, the sassi were a national shame.

It took a book to bring this tragedy to wider attention. Christ Stopped at Eboli was written by Carlo Levi (1902–1975), a Jewish writer-artist-political activist exiled from Turin by the Fascists to Basilicata in 1935. Published in 1945, the title sugg­ested that Bas­il­icata was beyond the hand of God, a place where pagan magic survived. Reacting to outrage from the general public over Levi’s descriptions, the government finally relocated and rehoused the 20,000 residents of the caves into modern housing in the New Town, on top of the cliff – in 1952! No rush, Italian government!!

The state owned the caves but the state had no interest in spending money on any improvements. Eventually the local council transformed the squatters into legal residents and connected them to the town’s utilities. A few business followed, along with the artists and writers who always seem to be the foundation of modernity.

The arrival of smart hotels started with Le Grotte della Civita. Grotte is a warm, comfortable hotel but the floors are uneven, the rock walls unad­orned, there is no restaurant and not many windows. This is the luxury only in the sense of a unique experience, a setting and history with which no other hotel can compare. Even the hotel's fittings and furniture are relics from decades gone by.

The best way to really feel Matera is to wander in the labyrinthine alleys and streets of the two sassi districts, Sasso Barisano and Sasso Caveoso. Their history is etched in the cave dwellings and their traditional house facades, in the pale stones underfoot and the enormous water cisterns below, and in the many rock churches cut into the yawning ravine (200 ms deep). The sassi are filled with silence, shadows, loneliness, mould and dead ends. The dark façades and the black entrances of still-abandoned caves exist even today. Some of Matera’s past is not so distant after all.

There are 155 frescoed cave churches, many of them only recently redis­cov­er­ed, in Matera. Cave churches were apparently excavated by Basilian monks fleeing persecution during the Byzantine Empire, and the faded frescoes were painted between the C8th and C13th. See Santa Lucia alle Malve, Chiesa Madonna delle Virtu and San Nicola dei Greci in Sasso Barisano and Chiesa di Santa Maria d’Idris. Cripta del Peccato Originale (the Crypt of Original Sin) is known as the Sistine Chapel of the cave churches... for its C8th frescoes representing theatrical scenes from the Bible.

The town's main historical museum, the Museo Nazionale Ridola, contains exhibits from Basilicata's distant past, until the Roman age. Palazzo Lanfranchi houses the Museo Nazionale d'Arte Medievale e Moderna della Regione Basilicata - an art museum of the medieval and the modern, focusing on southern artists. Centro Carlo Levi, which contains a range of paintings by the special artist and writer who became part of this region's modern history.

A hotel room in Sasso Caveoso 
Matera