Matera

We bravely ventured out into the crazy traffic once more … which reminds, me – forgot to say in my post about Rome that our navigation system (google maps since we’re now in a Skoda and not in the child-killer we had in Germany/Switzerland) who is usually a lady with a posh English accent, kept changing back and forth between her and a man’s voice for a day. Then things returned to normal for a couple of days, and then randomly, the gent made an appearance again for one instruction en route to Matera and hasn’t been heard from since! Boggles the mind.

Anyway, Matera … a troglodyte city, was considered “the shame of Italy” in the 1950s because of the extreme poverty and disease in its ancient Sassi districts (cave dwellings inhabited since the Paleolithic era). The residents were compulsorily relocated and the crumbling city, thought to be possibly the third-oldest in the world after Aleppo and Jericho, lay empty for the first time in 10,000 years.

Apparently, investment started trickling in from the late 1980s, and although those that had been forced out never returned, many of their descendants came back to open hotels and restaurants. It had a further boost when it became a world heritage site in 1993.

It also starred as Jerusalem in Mel Gibson’s controversial film “The Passion of the Christ” and in the unreleased Bond movie “No Time To Die“. And yes, that is a Dali statue in one of the squares.

The sassi are built on natural caves that have been excavated and extended over millennia. A warren of pale limestone churches, monasteries, palaces and houses rises above the caves, all balanced on the edge of a ravine.

We would have liked to bring you pics from inside one of these dwellings, but after 3 failed attempts to find it, we gave up.