For the visitor coming for the first time to Matera, the discovery of such a unique and ancient city is breathtaking. Matera encompasses one of Italy’s most fascinating historic centres.

Its ancient wards, called I Sassi, are a gigantic sculpture, an urban-planning miracle where it is possible to see so many elements referring to the historical events that took place over the centuries. Built near two small karst valleys on the right bank of a ravine, they appear as a maze of alleys, squares, neighbourhoods, grottos, stone churches, all plunging into the bowels of the earth, houses partly excavated and partly built, whose roofs sometimes serve as pathways and sometimes as floors for other houses.

Calcarenite, called tuff by the Materans, is the stone that has been excavated and worked for centuries by the skilled hands of the master masons and artisans. The grottos often served as quarries for recovering materials for constructing the façade of every home. Behind every door a true architectural marvel awaits. The different kinds of housing (caverns, courtyard homes, houses in rows, palazzos and palazzottos) vary, depending on the historical period and type of terrain. The same can be said for religious buildings. There are dozens of stone churches in the city and hundreds in the area around the ravine. And then there are the churches built varying from the same Romanesque style of the Cathedral of San Giovanni to the Baroque style of San Francesco and del Purgatorio, beautiful buildings on the plain on the outskirts of the modern city. Abandoned in the 1950’s when the residents were transferred to the new neighbourhoods, the Sassi have been reappraised and rescued over the last 15 years, with plenty of restoration and remodelling.

In 1993 UNESCO recognised the Sassi as a World Heritage site.

Suggested itinerary
Tour of the Sassi and the rock churches.

Distance from the Hotel
By car: about one hour.

How to get there
S.S. 96.