A Cave with a View

Inhabited since prehistoric times the caves of Matera in the Basilicata region housed mostly the very poor until recent...
Inhabited since prehistoric times, the caves of Matera, in the Basilicata region, housed mostly the very poor until recent renovations.Photograph by Simon Norfolk / INSTITUTE

Take any road in Italy, look up, and you’ll see a lovely hilltop town: a campanile, a castello, a few newer buildings spilling down the slope, as if expelled for the crime of ugliness. But even amid this bounty there is something exceptional about Matera. It clings to a denuded peak in the extreme south of the country, in the Basilicata region—the instep of Italy’s boot. Travellers are often shocked by the starkness of Matera. It’s a claustrophobic outcropping of cave dwellings carved into limestone, like scrimshaw, with hardly a tree or a blade of grass to be seen. In the afternoon sun, Matera looks like a pile of tarnished gold thrown down by a careless giant. Its severe beauty is as much a tribute to human resilience as to the rugged landscape where it is situated. Most places in Italy encourage you to celebrate the prettiness that wealth bestows: exquisite iron grillwork, festive marble fountains. Matera is more visceral—a monument to endurance and thrift, to hard lives lived without waste.

Matera may look inhospitable, but people have been settling here for a long time: it is often cited as one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, in a league with Aleppo and Byblos. There is something inherently alluring about this natural fortress, which towers above fertile plains and the Gravina River. A cave near Matera contains the remains of a hundred-and-fifty-thousand-year-old hominid; another has tools and bones from ten thousand years ago, and dozens of Neolithic sites dot the surrounding ridges. Matera was already a significant settlement in the Bronze Age.

Because of Matera’s narrow confines, rebuilding has been constant, making the city a palimpsest in stone. A dig in 1906, near the Duomo, in the town center, went thirty-five feet below the surface and found Christian coffins and the remains of a Saracen invasion from around 800 A.D. The scientists kept going, and below that they discovered statues, broken columns, and money from the Byzantine occupation, of around 400 A.D. Farther down, they uncovered ancient Greek and Roman coins and, under that layer, bits of ceramics from three thousand years ago. Matera stands at what has long been a crossroads between East and West. As Anne Parmly Toxey points out in her comprehensive 2011 study, “Materan Contradictions,” Greeks, Romans, Longobards, Byzantines, Saracens, Swabians, Angevins, Aragonese, and Bourbons all passed through the town. Man came here and never left—that’s the local boast. Given this history, it is jarring to learn that fifty years ago the government tried to make Matera go extinct.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, Giuseppe Antonini, a baron from Salerno, praised Matera for its “highly cultivated” citizens and “its vast and extremely fertile countryside.” The Roman abbot Giovanni Battista Pacichelli, a contemporary of his, was likewise impressed. The town, Pacichelli noted, was divided into three sections, as it is today. The main section, the Civita, contains grand churches and picturesque palazzi; it is flanked on both sides by the Sassi, or the Rocks—steeply graded districts where mostly peasants lived. The pileup of the Sassi disconcerted Pacichelli: the roof of a house, he wrote, could well be the floor of a church, “confusing the places of the living and the dead.” But he, too, admired what was then a thriving ecclesiastical hub. The town was the seat of an archbishop and, at the time of Antonini’s and Pacichelli’s accounts, a regional capital. From Matera, Spanish occupiers oversaw part of the Italian peninsula, eventually giving way to the French.

Matera’s status began declining in 1806, when Joseph Bonaparte moved the seat of the region’s government to Potenza, sixty miles to the west. Over time, Matera became known as “the capital of peasant civilization.” Rulers came and went, but the locals endured in their cave homes, or grotte. Each morning, they descended long, narrow trails into the valley, and worked in fields that were often miles away. At dusk, they returned to the mountain. Much of the communal life of the town was lived outdoors, in small courtyards called vicinati.

Materans were tough and self-sufficient. They had their own rituals and songs, their own demons and dialect. Many of their traditions developed as ways of preventing waste. Using shared ovens, they produced a unique horn-shaped bread that was leavened and baked slowly, yielding large pores that helped it stay fresh for a week. Rainwater was captured by a complex network of stone basins and underground ceramic pipes. Resourceful as the Materans were, however, their life style increasingly lagged behind that of the rest of the world. The better-off citizens of Matera began departing for the Piano—a more recently settled, flatter section of the hilltop—and the townspeople who remained in the Sassi were almost exclusively poor. In the caves, plumbing, electricity, and telephones were practically nonexistent. And until the nineteen-thirties you couldn’t take a wagon drawn by a donkey into the Sassi, only a hand-pulled cart.

Within Italy, Matera came to be seen as just another out-of-the-way town in the impoverished south; among foreigners, it had a reputation as a picturesque troglodytic locale. But, as the world modernized, curiosity gave way to repulsion. It seemed grotesque for people to live in lightless dwellings alongside their animals. In 1853, John Murray’s “Handbook for Travellers in Southern Italy” declared Matera “a dirty city” and noted that “its lower classes are said to be the most uncivilized in the whole province of Basilicata.” Its problems seemed intractable: poor sanitation, brutal work conditions, malaria. Yet the population continued to grow, reaching fifteen thousand by the early twentieth century. Half a dozen family members often crowded into a cave; residents used basins for toilets and burned the waste on the cliffs. Italy was falling behind the other nations of Europe, Basilicata was falling behind Italy, and Matera seemed to be last of all.

In 1902, Prime Minister Giuseppe Zanardelli visited the Sassi and reported that it awoke in him “not just amazement but deep pity.” He proposed new railways, which weren’t completed, and land redistribution, which didn’t happen. In 1926, the archeologist and social activist Umberto Zanotti Bianco called Matera “a Dantean horror.”

By this time, the Fascists were in power, and Benito Mussolini was determined to bring his humiliated country up to date. Matera was an obvious candidate for modernization. He connected the town to the Apulian aqueduct, providing the Sassi with running water, but the Fascists were stymied by the prospect of overhauling the caves. One solution, they decided, was to depopulate the Sassi and transfer the residents to houses near their fields.

Mussolini was ousted in 1943, and, paradoxically, it was one of his opponents, the leftist Carlo Levi, who fulfilled the Fascist agenda for Matera. Levi, a doctor and a painter from Turin’s upper class, had been arrested for anti-Fascist activities in 1935 and exiled to Aliano, south of Matera. He spent a year there, amid poverty that he would not have seen otherwise. In his 1945 autobiographical novel, “Christ Stopped at Eboli,” he described the peasants of Italy’s extreme south as living “in a world that rolls on independent of their will, where man is in no way separate from his sun, his beast, his malaria.” During his exile, Levi visited Matera only briefly, but his sister, also a doctor, passed through on her way to see him, and his book incorporated her observations of children “sitting on the doorsteps, in the dirt, while the sun beat down on them, with their eyes half-closed and their eyelids red and swollen” from trachoma. She described boys and girls trailing her down a path, begging for quinine.

Levi was a gifted polemicist, and his concise retelling of his sister’s experience changed Matera’s destiny. “Christ Stopped at Eboli” was widely translated, and the Sassi became notorious. Italian newspapers started calling Matera a national embarrassment. There were many villages in bad shape across southern Italy, but, as Toxey notes, the “mere idea of a cave, with its subhuman associations, offended the progressive mentality of the designers and leaders of the postwar world.”

In 1950, Alcide de Gasperi, the head of the Christian Democrats, visited the Sassi and declared that “this sad remnant of past centuries should disappear.” Two years later, the party passed the first bill for the risanamento, or cleanup, of the Sassi. Materans living in the worst caves would be moved; the more habitable grotte would be renovated.

At the time, the United States was funding the rebuilding of Europe through the Marshall Plan. With money flowing in, the Materan risanamento could be done with style. Italian architects were filled with modernist ideas for creating ideal communities. Problems of economic inequality that had never been solved politically might, they believed, be solved aesthetically. Materans would not be forced into generic new apartments; rather, they would be immersed in communities that reproduced the nurturing aspects of Sassi life—the courtyards where people met and gossiped, the communal ovens where they baked their special bread.

The Italian planners had in mind the ambitious example of the Tennessee Valley Authority, which had resettled thousands of Appalachian families. An American sociologist, Friedrich Friedmann, led a team of researchers—including a historian, a doctor, a geographer, and a psychologist—who assessed conditions in the Sassi. After architects devised several potential resettlement schemes, Friedmann’s team asked the peasants which design they thought was best. In the new rural development of La Martella, four miles west of the Sassi, the architect Ludovico Quaroni attempted to re-create the open-air vicinati that the Materans had used as their plazas and drawing rooms. Each resettled family was given a house with an adjoining barn for animals; the bedroom windows looked out on the stables, so that residents could keep an eye on the beasts at night, as they had in the Sassi. The first families were moved to La Martella in 1954. The Giornale del Mezzogiorno declared that Materans had travelled “from the darkness of the Sassi to cottages in the green countryside!” Italian newspapers continued to support the cause, and the government began encouraging residents whose caves had originally been thought salvageable to move.

The process of moving the peasants, though, did not go as planned. Not enough land was made available for farming. The new vicinati did not feel like the courtyards of Matera—they were not placed at the juncture of several houses, so residents did not naturally spill into them. Ambitions flagged, and builders began putting up ordinary apartment complexes.

In 1961, a reporter for La Stampa found the Sassi empty but for a man and his lonely mule, which had been “made melancholy,” its owner speculated, by the disappearance of the people it had known. In the article, the director of local tourism suggested, hopefully, that the Sassi should become a museum. The newspaper later reported that locals wanted to use cement to bury the Sassi—or dynamite to blow up the area. Such radical measures turned out not to be necessary. Long before the caves were empty, the oldest ones began crumbling, and the government began fencing them off. Matera’s ancient settlement appeared to be coming to an end.

In fact, the Sassi was about to be re-born. Squatters began occupying some of the caves, and others were used for drugs and prostitution. Then Raffaello De Ruggieri, a lawyer who considered the depopulation campaign a grievous mistake, moved in. “People felt I was crazy to subject my wife to the desolation and emptiness of the Sassi,” he recalls. The De Ruggieris were relieved to discover, however, that they had some friendly neighbors. Local artisans used the caves as workshops for making cucù—ceramic rooster whistles that are a town tradition.

Other young Italians began seeing the Sassi’s potential, and they became homesteaders. Roofs were buttressed, and modern plumbing was installed. In 1986, the Italian government encouraged the Sassi’s revival by offering subsidies that cut the cost of restoration work in half. Small shops began to appear, and in 1992 La Traccia, a software company, opened. “We came here because everyone else was boycotting it,” Franco Petrella, one of the owners, told an Italian newspaper.

For a time, the new Sassi and the old butted heads. When a pioneering restaurant, Il Caffè del Cavaliere, opened, someone set off a small bomb in its entryway. The Corriere della Sera reported that some new residents felt as if they were living in the Wild West, and were thinking of buying guns to fend off “harassment, requests for money, and acts of intimidation.”

But order was established, and as the limestone hilltop was restored its rough simplicity found new admirers. In 1993, unesco named the Sassi a World Heritage site, and with that designation “tourism really began,” according to Nicola Rizzi, a retired high-school teacher who was born in the Sassi. Cave dwellings were combined to form restaurants and boutique hotels.

Materan culture, once thought backward, was now admired for its warmth and its precocious commitment to sustainability. By the turn of the millennium, the Sassi had a popular jazz club, and artisanal winemakers were storing their grapes in the limestone warrens. A candlelit cave set on a hilltop turns out to be an ideal spot for a holistic spa.

In February, I flew to Bari, a port city on Italy’s southeastern coast, and drove forty miles, to the hilltop. To enter the Sassi now, you have to park on the edge of sprawling modern Matera, which sits along the western side of the old cave town, and go the final hundred yards on foot. The modern quarter was built on a plain above the cliffs, so you walk down a winding road to reach the Sassi. It was night when I arrived at my bed-and-breakfast, the Casa nei Sassi, which opened a few years ago. Light from street lamps installed in the nineties reflected off the paving stones. Cats prowled alleys that glistened in a light rain. For centuries, the street where I was staying had been an open sewer; the Fascists had paved it over. In the aughts, the strip became crowded with clubs and restaurants. It can get noisy during the summer, but is tranquil in the middle of winter. My room was at the top of a dozen twisting steps, in a converted hayloft, and it overlooked a bar where I sampled Padre Peppe, a Southern Italian liqueur made from green walnuts. From my balcony, I had a view of hundreds of irregular terraces, odd abutments, incidental buttresses, and half-hidden alleys.

The next morning, when the sun came up over the plateau that faces Matera to the east, I set out for a walk. You can get anywhere in town by way of the mazelike steps, but I took another road built by the Fascists, Via Madonna delle Virtù, which follows the edge of a thousand-foot cliff. Soon I stood on an outcropping—slabs of stone ending in a low wall. Behind me were the grotte, hunched and worn, one on top of the other. In the oldest part of the city, there are almost no stores, bars, or restaurants. Laundry fluttered from an occasional balcony, but most of the structures were unoccupied. Rows of vacant caves looked like giant skulls, with the empty doorways as eyes. The limestone walls were pockmarked, rain-streaked, and sun-bleached, and they varied in hue, from gray to yellow, as the light moved across them.

To see the new Matera emerging from the old, you have to look up the hillside. These residences have the best light and, being closest to the modern city, were the easiest to renovate. They first drew architects and other creative people, then arts professionals and Web designers, and, finally, wealthier types. It’s like a tiny Tribeca. Many of the cave interiors have been playfully reimagined; in some, ceilings have been knocked out, creating three-story aeries.

On my walk, I came upon a four-star hotel, Casa di Lucio, which opened in 2001. In the hotel’s windowless dining room, white laminate moderno tables were neatly aligned, and recessed wall lighting emphasized the pebbly nap and the roseate color of the limestone. A deep cistern was on display under glass. The hotel, whose rooms are spread out over several caves, had the one-of-a-kind glamour of the paradors that occupy former monasteries and fortresses in Spain. Nearby, in the basement of the Palazzo Gattini, whose owner was assassinated by brigands in 1860, there is a luxury spa offering hot-stone massages for ninety euros. An old cistern had been turned into a small swimming pool.

“Touch anywhere to begin.”

The new residents of Matera don’t always seem imbued with the communal spirit of the old days: some property owners have fenced off vicinati, making the most public part of the Sassi private. As I went around the Sassi, I was relieved when I came upon a buzzing marketplace where apples filled straw baskets and smoked fish dangled from wooden trestles. An energetic young woman was currying a donkey and chatting with a young man and woman in rough clothes. A dusty wooden cart was leaning against a cobbled wall. But when the carter smiled her teeth were perfect, and the way the cart leaned against the wall was archly jaunty. This hive of activity turned out to be a movie set: a Hollywood crew was filming a new version of “Ben-Hur,” starring Morgan Freeman. Next to a thirteenth-century church, San Pietro Caveoso, a Roman eagle had been placed atop a newly constructed arch—the scaffolding in back gave it away. A crew had installed klieg lights above the ancient buildings. I discovered that “Christ the Lord,” an adaptation of the Anne Rice novel, had been filmed in Matera a few months earlier. When I went into a grotta covered with a bed of straw, I joked to a production assistant, “Is this where Christ was born?”

“No,” he answered. “It’s just a typical Roman stable.”

Matera has played a prominent role in several Biblical films, serving as a stand-in for ancient Jerusalem. Christ has walked the town’s streets at least four times, most famously in Pasolini’s “The Gospel According to St. Matthew,” released in 1964. I became used to men going up and down the stairways in tunics, skullcaps, and neon sneakers.

Visitors armed with new guidebooks that praise the Sassi’s artisanal traditions sometimes know more about the town’s history than locals whose families were transferred to the modern quarter. I walked by a handsome Renaissance structure with a precipitous view over a low stone wall, and asked a local policeman the building’s name. “Convento di Santa Lucia,” he said, adding that he’d learned it only recently, from Japanese tourists.

At the end of my walk, I looked across the valley, past a stream that had carved out the mountain on which the Sassi clustered, toward terraces of olive and fig trees. They were once cultivated, but now grew wild and unpruned. Across the gorge were weathered limestone caves that had sheltered shepherds since Neolithic times. Not so different from the refurbished grotte behind me, they seemed to mock the idea of human progress.

And yet Matera has an affable commitment to the young and the new. The town increasingly has the feel of a small Bologna. It has a branch of the University of Basilicata and a classical conservatory, whose students’ music pours out as you walk under its windows. This winter, there was an exhibit on Pasolini. Each September, a women’s-fiction festival takes place. A jazz festival, Gezziamoci, runs nearly the whole year, with performances in and around the Sassi, and a national archeological museum, in a former convent, displays the riches of local digs. You can play mini-golf in an underground cistern, and the new restaurants of Matera produce extraordinarily good food, turning what was once shameful into a source of pride. Matera’s cucina povera contains a lot of chickpeas, fava beans, and crushed peppers. An especially delicious dish is called ciallèdd, which, in Matera, traditionally combines eggs, the springy town bread, and flowers that grow in the nearby Murgia. (Yellow asphodels are considered the sweetest.) Restaurants proudly announce their local sourcing, and waiters are happy to tell you the story of your dish, as if a parcel of Northern California had dropped into Basilicata.

This past October, the European Commission* named Matera one of its two capitals of European culture for 2019. (The other is Plovdiv, Bulgaria, a city that also traces its history to the Bronze Age.) Previous cultural capitals have included Istanbul and Marseilles, so the recognition is noteworthy for a small town in a region without an airport. The European Union has offered Matera fifty million euros for investment, and tourism will surely rise further.

The organizers of Matera 2019 have designed an official logo, a horn-shaped tube with six extrusions. Depending on which resident you ask, the image is meant to symbolize either the old communal courtyards of the town or its intricate water system. The town’s pride in the coming celebration was evident: as I walked around the Sassi, the symbol showed up with Pynchonian frequency.

The unesco designation is seen, in part, as an acknowledgment of Matera’s fraught history. No official apology has ever been given for the forced exodus. Half a century after the depopulation campaign, few cultural historians support the decision. It is now a shameful memory of a more desperate time in Italian history, after the trauma of the Second World War, when the country was intent on erasing its past. The transfer of Materans is seen as one of many patronizing attempts by élites to save indigenous people from themselves.

The town’s mayor, Salvatore Adduce, told me that the depopulation of the Sassi was “a laceration.” Despite the best efforts of Italy’s modernists, Materan culture did not flourish outside the caves. Some former Sassi residents abandoned farming and became construction workers, building homes for other émigrés. When that work ran out, they moved north, to work in factories. Many Materans eventually lost their dialect, their customs, their trades, and—most of all—their sense of community. A number of those who stayed behind joined the Italian bureaucracy and contributed to the demise of their town’s way of life. As Toxey, the author of “Materan Contradictions,” has written:

In the space of twenty-five years, the government transformed the populace from a dialect-speaking, land-working, troglodyte peasant culture that largely existed outside the Italian nation into wage-earning, tax-paying, Italian-speaking state employees and blue-collar consumers . . . dependent upon the government for work, wages, housing (rented from the government).

Locals were excited when Matera was named a capital of European culture—the mayor cried on national TV—but the accolade raised difficult questions. How do you commemorate a disastrous social experiment? What should Matera become? What should the town do with all those empty grotte? And how should Basilicata handle the influx of tourists?

Materans agreed that they did not want the Sassi to become just another afternoon tourist stop. “We don’t want busloads of barbarians setting up tents,” Mayor Adduce told me. “We want people who, above all, can know what Matera is.”

The artistic director of Matera 2019 is Joseph Grima, a former editor of Domus, the European design magazine. Grima’s approach might be called anti-Olympic City: he wants to avoid monumental gestures. The only thing that he plans to add to the Materan landscape is a portable concert hall, by the architect Renzo Piano, that Grima found in a warehouse in Milan several years ago. The structure, made of interlocking curved wooden ribs, can be brought to Matera, used for a year, and then taken down again. It fits with the town’s sustainable aesthetic, and is properly modest. Grima told me that he had thought hard about the unesco award. “It certainly brings wealth, but it has also killed so many cities,” he said, as tourists and destinations catering to them hollow out the real life of a place. He said of Matera that it would be particularly cruel to kill a city that has just come back from the dead.

Italy is constantly being confronted with challenges from its past: the palazzo too big to heat, the metro dig upended by a Roman ruin. At the same time, Italians like to say “Si fa”—“It works out.” Lately, though, things have not been working out in the Basilicata region. It is one of the poorest regions in Italy, and the unemployment rate is 14.7 per cent. Its manufacturing jobs are being lost at a rapid pace, and between 2008 and 2013 the economy contracted by 13.6 per cent.

One of Basilicata’s few bright spots is the Sassi. Not only does it draw tourist dollars; the Italians who now fill the caves are better educated and better paid than the people who left them. They are part of the generation that is succeeding the failed industrial one. Alberto Cottica, a Web entrepreneur who was a consultant to the Matera 2019 committee, told me, “The people who moved in were hipster central.” The Sassi has a lot of digital businesses—broadband is available—and it can seem as if every ounce of Matera’s patrimony were being presented on local Web sites. Last year, part of a prominent ancient building was loaned to a millennial-led organization called unMonastery—a group of self-described “civic hackers” who run a “social clinic” that embeds “skilled individuals within communities that could benefit from their presence.” (The group, now thriving, recently decamped for Athens.) Everything produced by Matera 2019 will be digitally accessible and copyright-free.

Grima champions Matera’s new digital ethic, and notes proudly that there is no plan to build a conventional new museum or exhibit space. To collect the artistic riches from the region and put them on display in the Sassi would deracinate them, he argues. Instead, curators in Matera will construct an online database that can guide visitors to various local collections. “The region has an extraordinary abundance—much of it in private hands,” Grima said. Matera plans to open a reading room to help visitors appreciate the region’s cultural treasures, but the objects will remain where they are. Matera’s vibrant virtual community, it is hoped, can replace the traditional one that the government destroyed.

One day, I took a tour of the Sassi with a man named Vito Festa, who grew up in the district in the nineteen-fifties. He is unusually open about his past: many older Materans still refuse to visit the Sassi or even talk about it. Some of those who built new homes overlooking the caves made sure that there were no windows facing their old dwellings. They found it humiliating to confront the way they had lived before the government rescued them. They had been told they were filthy so many times that they had internalized the sentiment.

Festa had spent several years in the north of Italy, working as a technician in a chemical lab, but he was not embarrassed about his southern past. Now sixty-seven, he looked like many older Materans, with an orangey skin tone that resulted from spending so much time outdoors when he was young. Marching with him up the hill, I could see that he enjoyed revisiting scenes of his boyhood: the steep path where he had carried water jugs home to his family, the place where he and some friends had accidentally kicked a soccer ball off a cliff. He showed me the outlines of old cisterns and called up the names of farmers who had cultivated the olive and fig trees that now grew wild. Many of his memories were about struggling to get enough to eat: he pointed to a parapet where he had put down bird traps (“I never caught any”), and to the roofs where his family had left almonds to dry. “No one worried about us back then,” he said. “Those were different times.” It had been a community, he remembered, where everyone helped everyone else. As we walked, he bumped into old friends and joked with them in the traditional Materan dialect, which is spoken slowly, with open vowels.

Festa had a comfortable pension; the Italian system had done right by him in the end. We walked past the Duomo—where he and his ten siblings and half-siblings had been baptized—and past the town’s one outdoor postcard vender, then followed the narrow path to the Sasso Caveoso, the poorest part of the town, where he had grown up. He had no trouble finding his grotta, now abandoned and exposed to the weather. Mold grew on the walls, and some of the stone facing had flaked off. Archeologists had dug into the floor, then covered their holes with straw. He remembered that the cave had two functioning lights, installed by the Fascists. Wires still dangled from the cave roof. His parents and his grandparents slept in the front, and he and his siblings slept in the back. Smiling, he said, “Una pazzia totale!” —what madness! He remembered that he and a brother had walked the family pig every evening before putting it in a stall behind their bed.

Festa’s family left the Sassi in 1959, when he was eleven, for Spine Bianche, one of the nearby developments built by the modernists. “We were so happy we jumped on the bed!” he recalled. He now owns his own house, in the north of town. As we drove to see it, I got my first good look at modern Matera. Given the economic difficulties of Basilicata, I was surprised by how vital the place seemed. It was a midsized city, with busy trattorias, a via nazionale that backed up at rush hour, and a dog-shit problem. We drove past a ten-foot-high statue of de Gasperi, the man who had emptied out the Sassi; his hand pointed upward, as if in benediction.

Festa’s house is about two miles from the Sassi, on a street of flat-roofed two-story buildings that seem to pay homage to the old grotte. The interiors, though, could not be more different. Festa proudly went through his garage to unlock the main door. He showed me pear and grapefruit trees that he was cultivating in a tiny enclosed garden in back, the shiny marble floors, and the two kitchens—one in the basement for days when it was too hot to cook near the living room. Everything sparkled. The Sassi caves are celebrated for their lack of right angles; Festa’s home was a series of perfect squares. Nothing had any history to it, except for one red rotary-dial phone, which was meant to be decorative. “I like pretty things,” Festa explained.

Around every corner in Matera, it seemed, I came across clusters of new residents—the prime engines of revitalization in the Sassi. Many of the men had two-day stubble and wore jackets that kept them warm inside the caves. Bit by bit, these locals were reviving the city, with Web services, excavations, renovations, or small artisanal stores.

Some of them were members of Circolo la Scaletta, a volunteer organization co-founded by Raffaello De Ruggieri, the lawyer who helped lead the charge back into the Sassi. During Matera’s dark time, La Scaletta had functioned like the Guardian Angels, watching over the town’s patrimony; its members had saved rare frescoes and uncovered various cavern churches in the Murgia. “We had to choose between being the children of misery or the children of a proud history,” De Ruggieri recalls. “We chose the proud history.” Over time, La Scaletta expanded to include an organization called Fondazione Zètema. One evening, the Zètema group took me to a museum it had just opened, showcasing the work of José Ortega, a Spanish artist who died in 1990 and spent years working in the Sassi. The museum contained several papier-mâché works inspired by local artisans. The house had been beautifully restored, but it felt clammy; to warm up, I opened some wooden doors and went out onto a balcony. Matera is labyrinthine in the manner of Venice: you never know which direction you’re facing. I was stunned to be met by the panoramic expanse of the Murgia, all empty blackness. Standing there felt almost like falling.

The members of Zètema suggested that I visit some of the rural cave churches in the area. In Matera, they pointed out, there was a confluence of Eastern and Western Christianity. Some of the town’s Renaissance churches were deliberately built on top of the more Eastern cave churches of an earlier age. In Matera, the new has always covered up the old.

I decided to seek out a local “rock church” that is nicknamed the Crypt of Original Sin. It can be visited only by appointment, and is situated just outside Matera, along the Appian Way. Above the church is an enormous railroad bridge that connects to nothing—it was part of a failed attempt to link Matera to the main national railway lines. Approaching the cave in a car, I didn’t see anything special. This was no accident: the monks who lived here, twelve hundred years ago, did not want to be noticed.

A small group of Italians were also visiting the church, and so we all descended into a low underground chapel. When the group’s guide turned the lights up, we found ourselves in the presence of half a dozen surprising frescoes. They were in the stilted Byzantine style, but they seemed imbued with an extraordinary modern sensibility: the flat figures looked at you with rounded, lively eyes, as if they might say hello to you on the street. The images, which depicted scenes from the Bible, were the least didactic series of church frescoes I’d ever seen. Mary was a warm, brown-eyed mother holding a baby in her arms. St. Peter had a beard and mustache, like a Levantine patriarch. The joy of being alive seemed more potent than worries about the Fall. Eve held out to Adam a wonderfully suggestive fig, instead of the usual apple. In an adjoining fresco, Adam raised his arms toward God as Eve emerged robustly from his rib. God was invisible except for his hand; long and delicate, it was the hand of an artist, not that of the muscular world-maker depicted on Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling. Amazingly, the rock church had been entirely forgotten during the war and the years of the Sassi’s depopulation. Now, like so much of Matera, it was found. ♦

*An earlier version of this article misstated which organization named Matera a capital of European culture for 2019.