Every design for Matera

From the Ponte sulla gravina you look back at the Sassi di Matera: two districts of houses cut into the soft limestone, stacked level upon level up the side of the canyon, with the Cattedrale della Madonna della Bruna e di Sant'Eustachio on the Civita between them. People have lived here without a break since prehistory, which makes Matera one of the oldest inhabited cities in the world. In 1993 the Sassi and the rock-cut churches across the Gravina became a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and in 2019 Matera was a European Capital of Culture.

The story the stones tell is not an easy one. By the end of the eighteenth century the peasants were crowded into the Sassi while the gentry lived up on the Piano, and in the twentieth century the old districts were declared unfit to live in and emptied, their families rehoused in the new town. The Casa Grotta nei Sassi and the Museo Laboratorio della Civiltà Contadina keep that life in view, and the Museo Archeologico Nazionale Domenico Ridola goes back further still.

Since a law of 1986 the Sassi have been restored and lived in again, and for anyone whose family came from here, the map leads home to the edge of the ravine.