Matera

Matera (Italian pronunciation: [maˈtɛːra], locally [maˈteːra] ; Materano: Matàrë [maˈtæːrə]) is a city and the capital of the Province of Matera in the region of Basilicata, in Southern Italy. With a history of continuous occupation dating back to prehistory (8 millennium BC), it is renowned for its rock-cut urban core, whose twin cliffside zones are known collectively as the Sassi. Matera lies on the right bank of the Gravina river, whose canyon forms a geological boundary between the hill country of Basilicata (historic Lucania) to the southwest and the Murgia plateau of Apulia to the northeast. The city began as a complex of cave habitations excavated in the softer limestone on the gorge's western, Lucanian face. It took advantage of two streams that flow into the ravine from a spot near the Castello Tramontano, reducing the cliff's angle of drop and leaving a defensible narrow promontory between the streams. The central high ground, or acropolis, supporting the city's cathedral and administrative buildings, came to be known as Civita, and the settlement districts scaling down and burrowing into the sheer rock faces as the Sassi. Of the two streambeds, called the grabiglioni, the northern hosts Sasso Barisano (facing Bari) and the southern Sasso Caveoso (facing Montescaglioso). The Sassi consist of approximately twelve levels spanning the height of 380 m, connected by a network of paths, stairways, and courtyards (vicinati). The medieval city clinging on to the edge of the canyon for its defense is invisible from the western approach. The tripartite urban structure of Civita and the two Sassi, relatively isolated from each other, survived until the sixteenth century, when the centre of public life moved outside the walls to the Piazza Sedile in the open plain (the Piano) to the west, followed by the shift of the elite residences to the Piano from the seventeenth century onward. By the end of the eighteenth century, a physical class boundary separated the overcrowded Sassi of the peasants from the new spatial order of their social superiors in the Piano, and geographical elevation came to coincide with status more overtly than before, to the point where the two communities no longer interacted socially. Yet it was only at the turn of the twentieth century that the Sassi were declared unfit for modern habitation, and the government relocation of all their inhabitants to new housing in the Piano followed between 1952 and the 1970s. A new law in 1986 opened the path to restoration and reoccupation of the Sassi, this time – as noted by the architectural historian Anne Toxey – for the benefit of the wealthy middle class. The recognition of the Sassi, labelled la città sotterranea ("the underground city"), together with the rupestrian churches across the Gravina as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in December 1993 has assisted in attracting tourism and accelerated the reclaiming of the site. In 2019, Matera was declared a European Capital of Culture.