By the time our kind host in Scigliano, Raffaele, dropped us off so we could catch our train out of Cosenza, I was unfortunately feeling well and truly wretched. The cold that Husbear had been dealing with for several days hit me full force and knocked me just about over.
What really pissed me off about this was that this happened just as we were going to the place I’d been most excited to see on this trip – Matera. The town’s history goes back 7,000 years (yeah, 7,000), which is when people first started carving homes out of the soft tufa rock. They’re now known as sassi.
People lived in the sassi continuously until 1952, when the government, spurred at least in part by Carlo Levi’s book Christ Stopped at Eboli, kicked everyone out and put them into government housing. Levi’s book detailed the horrible living conditions in the sassi; an infant mortality rate of over 50% was perhaps caused in part by up to 12 people living in one cave along with their farm animals. Now, however, people have started moving back in and renovating the sassi, turning many of them into luxury hotels and b&b’s.
Matera has grown in fame and popularity over the last few years as well, since Mel Gibson chose it for the location for “The Passion of the Christ.”
The first couple of days, we splurged and rented our very own sasso through a friend of Raffaele’s (B&B del Casale.) The part set into the actual hill dated to around 1000, though the front part was considerably newer – perhaps around 1500.
It was a beautiful place, though after two nights we had to move to one of the town’s terrific hostels, Le Monacelle… considerably more wallet-friendly. (Plus, we ended up having our own room there, too – with 16 beds this time!)
We ate a lot of beans and pasta, apparently a specialty of Basilicata – seriously hefty food.
From La Talpa, Sasso Barisano - cavatelli with chickpea puree, porcini mushrooms, arugula, and tomatoes.
From Il Cantuccio, near the Duomo - strascinate with black bean puree.
Since we had our own kitchenette, we went to the market one day and picked up a head of bizarre chicory we’d never seen before (delicious, but odd)
and made it into a salad we ate with a couple of really surprisingly good takeout pizzas.
We also looked at the cultural and historic sights of Matera – don’t you worry. We visited a sasso that’s been turned into a museum, decorated with the help of the family that lived there until the 1950s.
Children slept in drawers and the hen lived and laid eggs under the bed. And there was a stall for a horse.
We visited the chiese ripiestri, or rock churches – small churches carved out of the rock, some dating from the 6th century CE. Some have bits of Byzantine frescoes from the 11th through 14th centuries, though out of the five we visited, none of them had more than a little bit of paint remaining.
The museum of modern and medieval Basilicatan art was also mildly diverting, though we were sort of surprised to find ourselves inside of it since we had thought we were buying tickets for the Carlo Levi Center. This was not what we were expecting.
Apparently the two are connected, since we did eventually find ourselves in a room with Carlo Levi’s paintings. It was interesting to see the people he’d talked about in his book through his painting, and to find out that not only was he a pretty good writer, he was a pretty good painter as well.
But mostly, being in Matera was all about looking at the sassi. They sit on top of each other, each row forming a road for the row above. Many of them are still uninhabited, abandoned, which enforces the feeling of desolation and hopelessness still present in much of the area. There’s such a strange beauty about the place, though.
I think it was our Lonely Planet that said that Matera’s history of outrageous misery has made it into the tourist destination it is today, and there is oddly a lot of truth to that statement. An infant mortality rate of over 50 percent just over 50 years ago, in a country considered to be a part of the developed world, is pretty much impossible to conceive.
All of this made me feel even stupider and angrier for having to spend much of the time we were there like this.
