Italy Off the Beaten Path: 21 Days Beyond the Tourist Circuit

Why Matera was called "the shame of Italy", and why UNESCO called it a world treasure 30 years later

Matera's 20th-century history represents one of the most dramatic reversals in Italian cultural politics. In 1945, Carlo Levi published Christ Stopped at Eboli, his account of his internal exile to the Lucanian interior (Basilicata) in 1935-36, which documented the poverty, malaria, and isolation of the region's peasant communities with extraordinary literary power. The book made Matera nationally famous as an emblem of Italy's "southern question", the intractable gap between the industrial north and the agricultural south. In 1950, Prime Minister Alcide De Gasperi visited Matera, saw the sassi (cave dwellings where people and animals still lived together in the 1940s), and declared them "a national shame", the statement that launched the forced relocation program (1952-1959) that moved 15,000 Matera sassi inhabitants to modern housing, emptying the caves. The emptied sassi were then rediscovered by architects and cultural tourists in the 1980s as a unique example of cave urban architecture. UNESCO listed them in 1993. What had been declared a shame of poverty and backwardness was reinterpreted as a treasure of vernacular architecture in a single generation, a reversal that says as much about changing cultural values as about the physical reality of the place.