Matera and the Sun

Good morning! I’m so excited about this blog post- yesterday was an unforgettable experience. First though, I have to tell you about my Uncle Bobby and Aunt Diane. As you know a few days ago my camera suddenly broke while I was taking a picture in Lecce’s main piazza. Apparently mine was one of a batch with lens manufacturing problems. There is nothing to do but send it to Canon and hope for the best, but who knows how long that will take and we were taking a trip to famous Matera in a few days. I tried taking the camera apart and posted a picture on Facebook trying to joke about using a gelato spoon as a screwdriver, but by the end of the day I was in tears.

Well the next afternoon I signed into Facebook to find a message from my Aunt Diane, who is a professional photographer living in Canada with my painter and designer uncle. She said she understood how painful it is to be in a place like Italy without a working camera and offered to wire me money for a new one immediately, specifically so I could take pictures the next day of Matera. How many people do you know who would do that? She and my uncle have always been so encouraging of my art and this is an extreme example of the constant support these two artists give me even from afar. I love my new camera and these pictures and this post is dedicated to them.

Yesterday morning we woke up early and clambered groggily onto the bus to promptly fall back asleep for the three-hour trip to Matera, in the neighboring region of Basilicata. We were advised again and again to bring giant bottles of water, slather on sunscreen, and wear hats and long sleeves if possible. Well my head is too big for hats, and I would rather die than wear long sleeves and pants in 100-degree weather so I covered myself in sunscreen, chugged a liter of water, and was wearing a sundress when we got off the bus at the overlook of Matera.

This post is going to be absolutely filled with pictures, and these are only a fraction of the ones I took, because there is no way to adequately describe this city. I have been to Florence, Siena, and Rome, and I’ve never fallen in love with a place like I did with Matera. Yes I know it’s hard to believe, and really there’s no comparison between this mountain town and the capital of Italy, but every corner we turned I lost my breath. Now this may have been in part from the unbearable heat and sun and the three hours of walking around the city, but I’m going to say it was the sights of the city.

After we climbed down to the edge of the canyon in front of the city, gazing across to the rocky houses carved into the cliff face, we got back into the bus and drove around to the modern town. Matera is separated into two parts, the old city and the new, but I will get to more on that later. The new city sits behind the old, and most of the residents live there. We stopped on a quaint street of cafes and restaurants and went into one that the program had rented out exclusively for us. With 25 people, many of whom enjoy speaking in loud English, there’s really not much choice.

Lunch was comprised of hearty Materan bread that we all immediately fell in love with, the choice of three pastas (I chose the mushroom cavatelli), and fresh fruit and coffee. It was absolutely delicious, and after having had to cook most of our food or pay for it for the last two weeks, our cheap little hearts were thrilled at the prospect of a free meal. I talked with one of the waiters for a bit when I went up to order coffee (my favorite iced with almond) and found him pretty cute. Being the creep that I am when we were leaving I turned around quickly at the door to take a snap of the restaurant, and him, and then hurried out. Imagine my surprise when I went to look at the photo and saw him staring right at me! Oh lord that’s embarrassing. One of my friends was laughing because she’d been watching him try to casually pose every time my camera was pointed in his vicinity.

Full on our free lunch we were in high spirits as we made our way towards the old city, called The Sassi (the rocks) with our tour guide Antonio. We stopped at an overlook on the wall separating the old from the new and he gave us a brief history of Matera. The old city was literally carved into the mountain, some of the dwellings descending two or three floors down and others with brick levels added to the top. The city was settled during the Paleolithic, and found by the Romans around 3 B.C. Throughout the centuries it has been controlled by the Lombards, Byzantines, the Normans, and the Germans. When the classes separated the new city was built and the old city became the slums for the Braccianti, laborers who worked for food and shelter. Hard to imagine this beautiful city as the ghetto, but that’s Italy for you!

During World War II Matera rose up against German occupation and was the first Italian city to fight against the Wehrmacht. After the war, the government tried to evacuate the old city for safety reasons, offering to pay years of rent on apartments for the lower classes in the new city. They were met with a lot of resistance, but eventually old Matera was emptied. A few years later, when reconstruction was under way, a few families bought out blocks of houses and combined them. The city is still relatively uninhabited but in the process of restoration. All I can say is that I will be buying a house there as soon as I have the money/the assurance that it won’t cave in on top of me.

The city sits overlooking a huge canyon that has been slowly carved out by a determined little stream called the Gravina. Looking back across to the overlook we first stopped at, one can see what the town would have looked like before inhabitation- small caves and grottos in the bare rock. We got to go into four ancient churches excavated from the rock, filled with frescoes from all different eras of art. We were also able to explore a renovated home, set in three levels with one at the bottom for their animals, and another for their winemaking. I’m going to sound like such a geek but The Sassi kept reminding me of Minas Tirith from Lord of the Rings, so naturally I was in heaven.

Ancient Materan tombs carved into the rock.

The day was hot and the sun was strong, but there was a strong breeze rustling through the streets of the empty city, and cool shadows were everywhere when we stopped to listen to Antonio. This post is getting pretty long, so I'll leave you to imagine the rest through the pictures, but if you can ever make your way down to the sunny south of Italy, this should be your first stop.

After our three-hour tour was over, we had a little bit of free time to walk around the city, buy some pastries and gelato, and stockpile giant loaves of Materan bread. We got back on the bus and passed out again for the long ride home. It was an amazing day.