Lost and Found

The countryside of Basilicata, in southern Italy, is visually what you might expect: fields of golden brown and green pattern the hills like patches; occasional relief is provided by stands of olive or apricot trees, or by rocky points where the hills break into small mountains. The only other variation comes from the towns scattered between the farms, which seldom record populations over one thousand. These cap the hilltops like the crests of waves—both part of and distinct from the agricultural lands that surround them. But these, at least from a car window, pass quickly, and give way once more to hills so uniform that it becomes difficult to gauge distances.

Basilicata. In the background at left, a town is just visible.

It is a shocking experience, then, to come upon the city of Matera. The surface of the landscape is broken by a plunging gorge—the work of a thin river over millions of years. White cliffs descend to the water, fracturing the grassy ground-cover; among them, knots in the rock open into deep, black caves. But as the land opens downward, it also projects upward—the river curves between small mountains, which extend the cliff-face into summits. These, too, are full of caves. And out of one of them rise the improbable buildings of Matera, a subterranean city on a mountaintop.

Though part of the Roman empire, Matera bears few (if any) marks of its influence. For unlike a standard Roman town, Matera's "founding principle" is the inhabitation of its caves, a practice dating back to the stone age. For centuries, through the middle ages and into the 20th century, these caves—or sassi—were home to hundreds of peasant families. The entrances to the caves would be built up into small house-frounts, whose windows provided the only natural light aperture for the space. Larger caves were given larger façades and bell towers, converted to underground churches. Steep staircases thread the cliff face, the closest thing to streets that the landscape will allow.

Sassi on the lower slopes of Matera.

Matera and its gorge.

All this stonework is accomplished with blocks of the cliff itself. The color of the town, therefore, is exactly that of the gorge below—a sandy, whitish grey. It is as if the mountain has turned itself inside out, expelling its stone outward into flat walls, leaving empty caverns behind. Often, one cannot tell where rock ends and masonry begins. Within this semi-landscape, a complex urban space was evolved: small gathering-spaces called vicinati served as insular forums for families and neighbors to meet, exchange news, and share resources (water, stone, food).

A vicinato, a while ago.

For the peasants who lived there, however, urbanity was only one pole of existence. Every day, the working farmers of Matera would travel between four and six hours on foot to reach their plots of land in the surrounding countryside. The city, then, was daily expanded and contracted, like a breathing organism—pooling out into the terrain, collected back into itself at night. Matera's peasants lived both into and off of the landscape—natural caves providing their homes, expansive fields their livelihood.

Matera, however, was not only a city of peasants. East of the mountainous sassi extends the piano, whose name—"flat"—pretty much sums up its topography. Beginning in the 17th century, the piano was the refuge of wealthy Materans seeking to remove themselves from the peasantry. Landscape differences were thus engaged to reflect economic distinctions—not only was the piano geographically separate, but it also allowed for the construction of Renaissance palaces that required flat footing.

Now, though, Matera's urban landscape tells another story. After World War II, Italy's post-fascist loss of identity sent it soul-searching. In this process of combing for new meanings and covering up old ones, Matera attained an unlikely notoriety—entirely because of the sassi. The fact that most Materans lived in caves, with animals and poverty for company, became a symbol for Italian "backwardness"—so much so that Matera came to be known as "the shame of Italy." In response, the Italian government of the 1950s forcibly expelled all residents from the ancestral sassi, moving them instead into new public housing projects on the piano. Together with a declining need for agricultural labor, the evacuation of the sassi for the flatlands transfigured Matera from a largely agricultural town into a proletarianized "metropolis," in which streets designed for heavy traffic were stamped onto a grid of monolithic apartment complexes. The erasure of the sassi was so complete that former residents, in 1990s interviews, claimed not to remember their life there.

A square in Matera. The piano extends to the left; below to the right, the town of the sassi. Underneath the piazza at front, excavations have revealed additional sassi—an illustration of Matera's covering-over and attempted resuscitation of its own past.

Of course, the Italian government had a change of heart (much like in World War I). Largely due to professorial lobbying, Italy lifted the ban on living in the sassi in the 1970s, and embarked on a project of their "restoration." However, though some families have returned or immigrated to the caves, their former purpose and cultural meaning has proved irrecoverable. Instead, they are preserved as UNESCO-recognized historical monuments. Italy has even legislated that sassi residents must replace their practical aluminum window-frames, because only wood frames are "historically accurate." This kind of thing makes me smile—the idea that the way to preserve something "historical" is to freeze an imagined (often impractical) version of its past.

Those of Matera's caves that are neither inhabited or open for tours have generally become restaurants, shops, and hotels—all of which cater to its now-massive tourist population, and all of which equally participate in the aestheticization of the sassi. Their cave-ness makes them "hip," "cool," "photo-worthy." Thus, a photo:

The cave-lounge in my hotel in Matera. Hip, no?

Ultimately, here's where we've ended up: the migration of Matera up onto the piano has been irreversible. Though the sassi have now been converted from "disgusting" to "culturally significant," and in the process somewhat rehabilitated, the effect has been to remove this entire neighborhood from the province of Matera—to lift it out of the Basilicata countryside to which it was once so connected, and to place it in the plane of "international tourist destination"—the weird floating landscape connected by airports and guidebooks in which every place is both itself and not-itself, both a city and a mere aesthetic object. The uniformity of modern city life means that we both marvel at the lost possibility of difference—the alien cave-life of Matera's former residents—and simultaneously quarantine such difference within museumified walls, such that it does not intrude on our urban systems.