Matera

The city sits on the right bank of the Gravina river, whose canyon separates the Lucanian hills from the Apulian Murgia plateau. Cave dwellings were cut into the softer limestone of the western gorge, using two streams that meet near the Castello Tramontano to form a defensible promontory. Above them, the acropolis Civita holds the cathedral and administrative buildings, while the cliff districts Sasso Barisano facing Bari and Sasso Caveoso facing Montescaglioso cascade down the rock.

Archaeological layers show occupation from the eighth millennium BC, making the site potentially one of the oldest continuously inhabited settlements worldwide. The town passed through Roman, Lombard, Arab, Byzantine, Swabian, Angevin, Aragonese and Bourbon rule. By the late eighteenth century a social divide linked elevation with status, the Sassi housing peasants and the Piano plain the elite. Declared unsuitable for modern life in the early twentieth century, the Sassi were emptied between 1952 and the 1970s; a 1986 law allowed their restoration and today they host hotels, restaurants and cultural venues.

Visitors walk a maze of paths, stairways and courtyards that link the levels, while medieval town clinging to the canyon edge remains invisible from the west. The landscape is marked by castle, the cathedral on Civita and scattered rupestrian churches overlooking the river. The Sassi therefore illustrate a settlement continuously occupied for at least three millennia, their rooms now serving a generation of residents and travelers.