Matera

The Sassi of Matera represent the historical centre of the city. They are, today, almost completely uninhabited. In 1952 they housed about 15.000 people when a state law decreed that they needed to be evacuated for hygienic – sanitary reasons.

The urban structure of these quarters is truly unique: the dwellings are caves, carved into the tufa stone ravine, the Gravina. A breathtaking landscape of intricate cobbled stone alleys and stairs, caverns, genteel buildings, archways, balconies, vegetable gardens and large terraces, crowned by characteristic chimneys and steeples of the numerous rupestral churches.

The layering of the dwellings is in itself astonishing. Equipped with hydraulic channels that feed reservoirs carved deep into the ground, which are able to maintain water cool and drinkable even in the hottest summer periods. Looking at the structure of the Sassi we can clearly see the social and architectural evolution of mankind, from simple dugout shelters, to caves with facades, to the construction of roofs on which to create 'suspended' vegetable gardens; and the evolution of the social structure of a community – human interaction amongst individuals, families, dwellings, neighbourhoods and churches, from rural to urban.