The Sassi and the Park of the Rupestrian Churches of Matera
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How it came to be
The Sassi of Matera are a town of cave dwellings cut into the limestone of the Murgia plateau. They lie on the slopes of a ravine called the Gravina, and people first lived here in the Palaeolithic. From the 8th century, as the town spread beyond the Roman walls of the Civita, its first core, use of the caves grew.
The first homes were natural caves closed off by walls of blocks dug from the rock, in two districts, Sasso Caveoso and Sasso Barisano. In the 13th century a Romanesque cathedral was built on the Civita between them, the Casalnuovo district followed in the 15th century, and the Piano in the 17th and 18th. Rock-cut churches, monasteries and hermitages are scattered across the plateau around the town.
In the 1950s the Italian government moved most of the people of the Sassi, who lived in extreme poverty and with malaria, to new districts of the city. The empty quarters decayed, but a 1986 law leased the state-owned districts to the town, and from the 1980s residents began to return. The Sassi and the Park of the Rupestrian Churches were inscribed in 1993.
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