Kiwi Roaming

I have a postcard of Matera sitting on the piano, sent to us by Don & Sophie on their last European trip. It’s not often a place lives up to your expectations but Matera certainly did for us. I’ve taken about 200 photos which really don’t do the vibe of the place justice. This blog is about the history and experience we had in Matera.

We took a walking tour on our first morning. Our tour was one of three groups that left the same company, an English speaking group and took 2 hours. It was stinking hot but Anna our guide was very focused on finding shade. She was a chain smoking woman, older than us who said she takes 2-3 of these tours a day and specifically does the James Bond experience tours.

Matera is really really old, one of the oldest continuously inhabited places in the world, it’s built on a steep hill and is essentially a series of ancient caves dug into the limestone rock with additional above ground dwellings built on top in more recent times. It’s had a long history of being invaded and taken over by successive armies. It’s also had a checkered history of people living in the caves in abject poverty alongside their animals for many years.

New investment in Matera has happened since it was declared a UNESCO world heritage site in 1993 and today you can see cranes and caves being converted into hotels all around the place. It deserves to be a UNESCO site, it’s so unique, with two hills over a ravine which also houses caves along the Ridgeline.

The whole cave system is fascinating, in the Sassi part of Matera they dug massive cisterns below the caves and captured water via a series of pipes for the community to use. The Sassi is built in a series of interconnected squares which acted as social hubs for the women of the community to sit together and share gossip, food and do crafts etc. We went into a staged traditional cave which was fascinating.

In more recent times the Italian government forcibly moved 16,000 habitants from the Sassi caves into modern housing. The caves were severely over crowded, breading disease and were the location of extreme poverty. So new housing was built on the Piano (at the top of the hill) and people moved to new apartments and given allotments for their animals who had previous colocated with them in the caves.

Today the caves are luxury accommodation and expensive restaurants. We met an Australian couple on our tour staying in one of these luxury hotels where the cisterns below have been turned into therapeutic baths, each cave room themed by the various oppressors who conquered Matera over the years, and they even have special togas to wear to breakfast. This costing them 5 times the cost of our wee room for a night.

We were told the renovation and expansion of Matera is slow and expensive. As it’s a heritage site building materials must be the same as original, so limestone with terracotta water pipes – all expensive materials. They also need to ensure the ventilation system is made from the same materials and any modern improvements are not visible from outside.

There is a cathedral at the top of the hill and 150 rock churches, we went into a couple of these on our tour and saw ancient mosaics and fresco’s – interestingly christ had brown skin and brown hair in these ancient depictions. Of the still operating churches there was a cacophony of bells every hour and at times for call to prayer.

Locals now all live in the city on the Piano where there is a population of about 60,000 people, with a wider population of 190,000 in the region. There were walking tours and Tuk Tuk tours – which can only cover the flat parts as they can’t access the stairs of course – everywhere, groups arrive from cruise ships and in tours from other parts of Puglia during the day but it certainly both cooled down and quietened down at night.

We enjoyed the labyrinth of stairs. My cheap sandals did not so I needed to be wearing shoes whenever we were walking around. We got to know our way around and found every path leads to the top/bottom eventually. There is a real range of tourist businesses there and plenty of ways to be parted with your money.