I read about Matera years ago in Saveur magazine. I was a traveling-to-Italy neophyte at the time, and the idea of venturing into regions with more than three syllables, that I had yet to see featured in even one romantic comedy, felt daunting.

So Basilicata, with not one easily accessible stereotype—no Ligurian lemons or Venetian canals or Tuscan cypresses or crumbling Roman baths—felt out of my cognitive league.

Still. The article intrigued me. More than the words, I remember the photographs—a sun-bleached tumble of house, spilling down a hill, windows like vacant eyes. Yes, definitely intriguing, but it couldn’t compete with my Italian ideal of easy-going hills lined with dappled vineyards. So I didn’t hang onto the story of Matera, though the description of Matera’s culinary claim to fame snagged in my memory, a particular kind of pepper, crisped in olive oil, and sprinkled with salt. Growing up on Mexican food, this sounded like a blur of two cherished cuisines.

When we finally planned a trip to Italy, I flirted with the idea of those peppers, the heart-twisting image of those still houses…but ultimately we chose the known over the unknown. Like so many travelers do. Anything else would feel like dropping off a cliff, into some sort of abyss. Would anyone ever find us in Basilicata?

As we’ve grown older, we’ve become more experienced travelers and as such, we now flinch at heading anywhere featured in a romantic comedy. Instead, we crave that unknown—the surprise, the discovery, the adventure in a country that has become as familiar as a childhood best friend.

So when we set our sights on Puglia for our seaside destination, it only took a beat before adding in Matera. Though nowadays, it’s no longer an obscure touristic footnote, but rather a well-traveled destination. Nonetheless, we know very little about it, other than it’s often tacked onto trips to Puglia. After all, it still has yet to be featured in any comedies, romantic or otherwise, though the new James Bond movie has some thrilling exploits there, and I for one can’t wait to see it.

On the drive from Alberobello, I read up on Matera, trying to figure out why I had a desolate feeling about the place—an emotional hangover of that long-ago article—without the underlying remembrance of the history.

The very best article I read on the subject comes from Smithsonian and in fact, was so good, it prompted me to subscribe. So we’re all on the same page, let me fill you in.

Archeological evidence suggests that Matera has been inhabited for 9,000 years. No, that’s not a typo. I’ll write it out, so you can be sure I didn’t accidentally add a zero. Nine thousand years. Originally a collection of caves in the Paleolithic Age, over time people added to the fronts of the caves, creating “spontaneous architecture”, where there is no plan or blueprint, but rather people build where they can and one person’s ceiling becomes a neighbor’s floor and graveyards get built on church rooftops. Known as the Sassi, or “rocks”, these cliff dwellings were mostly places of poverty. Yes, there were some grand homes, but mostly, the dwellings consist of a door leading into a room, that leads to another room for the animals. That’s it. A window was considered an amenity.

Life was hard, but it was hard together. It can be faddish to romanticize the poor, as having a shared experience, a reliance on simple pleasures. Economic hardships can come to seem quaint from the privilege of a hotel dweller considering life in the Sassi. But there’s an inherent danger, as romanticization prevents empathy. But from what I know, life, particularly in the early 1900’s Sassi, it was pretty awful, lightened with a bit of comfort from it being awful for everyone.

Around 1950, a journalist visited Matera, and dubbed the Sassi “The Shame of Italy.” After all, these poor people lived in actual caves. Chickens hopped on their dining room tables, most residents of the Sassi had to line up for water. All this when people in the United States were debating the merits of poodle skirts. Embarrassed, the Italian government went into action, rounding up all 16,000 residents of the Sassi and removing them to housing projects in the Piano, the modern part of Matera spread across the top of the hill.

Given a choice, it’s unlikely many would have opted to remain in the Sassi, but nonetheless, they struggled with new lives in separate boxes, without the support of their community that had gotten them through their previous struggles. They felt the loss of their life lived outdoors—neighboring families sharing a courtyard to prepare meals together, to support each other. To add to the culture shock, a stigma clung to people from the Sassi. Relocated families pretended they were from other parts of Italy. Many never discussed their previous lives to younger generations, and never went back to Sassi, even if they lived just a few kilometers away.

After a number of years, people drifted back, mostly for nefarious purposes, to hide away their illicit activities. Eventually, though, other people began settling in the Sassi, people who began to think of the Sassi in a new way. I love this quote from the Smithsonian article— 

“Obviously, there was a truth there, the houses were unhealthy, conditions were terrible. But why did the government focus on the failures of the last 100 years, and forget that the Sassi had thrived for the previous 9,000?” De Ruggieri asks. “The only real problem of the Sassi was economic: It was poverty that was making the Sassi unhealthy.”

Intrepid sorts purchased houses in the Sassi for practically nothing. Yes, many were dangerously unstable, but could be restored. Nowadays, about 3,000 people live in the Sassi and Matera is struggling with what they want the Sassi to mean, to be. They don’t want to become a place where “culture is consumed” , where people make their income by selling Matera to tourists, rather, they want to return it to being a dynamic, real place, albeit not defined by poverty.

After Alberobello, I understood these dueling priorities—making money and making an actual life. In Alberobello, we learned to see past the tourist shops because of our tour with Mimmo, but for many, Alberobello is simply a cute place to visit, and the identical souvenir shops every 100 meters evidences a town monopolizing on that perception.

The history of Matera, for better or worse, is harder to monetize. It never had a heyday, so there’s no era to preserve. Its claim to fame is the caves, and the story of those caves is one of the duality between human suffering and human strength. Kind of hard to put that on a keychain.

As I read the articles on the drive from Alberobello to Matera, the landscape out the car window became gradually rockier and more windswept. Forlorn.

Matera itself is small, so once we approached it, we were at our Airbnb in about 5 minutes. I know travel forums tout staying in the Sassi, as there are a number of fabulous cave hotels, but we didn’t opt to do that. Partly because this was the tail end of our journey to southern Italy and I was just too tired to think through the Sassi options; plus I just didn’t want to spend the extra money, especially since we thought we may opt to stay longer, as we did in Gallipoli. So on our last day in Gallipoli, knowing we only had an overnight in Alberobello before landing in Matera, we picked something a block or two from the Sassi, but also a block or two from the centro of the modern section of town. Mostly because the host was well rated, and we needed an effortless situation, but also because we could see that after our booking, the house was only available for one night before the next booking. Which meant if we decided to stay an extra day, we’d be able to, since the house had a two night minimum.

What a treat to have parking right at the apartment, especially since we’d had to lug all of our luggage (including the bags of groceries we’d started accumulating in Torre Chianca) over hill and dale in Alberobello.

Keith had to get to work right away, so I took the kids for a little giro. I didn’t want to explore the Sassi without Keith, and anyway the sun was near on setting but I figured, nothing wrong in a glimpse. My quickening heart hurried my footsteps. Down the hill the the corner, we turned left at the sign for the Sassi, and immediately, the view opened up in front of us.

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I don’t know how else to convey the pause. In our breath, in our words, in our hearts. How can a place be so stirring and so…vacant at the same time? We walked down the hill a little farther, our eyes fixed on the Sassi spilling before us, the buildings sapped of color by centuries of sun, rising and falling without rhyme or reason. My eye couldn’t detect a straight line, other than in the windows and doors, and often not even those proceeded linearly. The Smithsonian article likened Matera to “a dynamic cubist sculpture” and now I understood why.

I walked away to turn my attention to thoughts more mundane, like getting ingredients for dinner. But my head, it remained full of Matera, the questions tumbling like the Sassi itself: Was the district contained to the valley we saw or was there another part to it? Didn’t I read in an article somewhere about another period when the Sassi was sparsely populated, like people left to pursue agriculture elsewhere? What was life actually like there when it was full of people? How did they live—was there water, schools, a bancomat? Just kidding on that last bit.

One thing was clear, as eager as we’d become to get back to Spello, we’d need one more day in Matera. Keith shrugged at the notion when we returned to the house, laden down with dinner provisions and stories of the Sassi and also the more modern part of town, which was not the bare scrape of a city that I’d pictured, but an elegant, cosmopolitan area, throbbing with life. Keith didn’t want to stay longer. He wanted to go home. I nodded, I did too, and yet… how could we leave so soon? I didn’t argue. I figured I’d let Matera plead its case.

The next morning we walked that short L-jog to the Sassi. We rounded the corner and the Sassi appeared, like a play’s backdrop falling into place. Keith let out an expletive he never uses with children present and that I cannot type. Then he said nothing. He wouldn’t be moved forward, he wouldn’t respond to our words. We left him to drink it in, our eyes turned back to the Sassi, haunting the hillside.

Finally, Keith followed us, his words in chaos, unable to coral the his thoughts. We nodded. He didn’t need to explain. We got it.

He inhaled again and shook his head. Then we wandered. Where possible, we leaned into gates of plastic or wood stretched across jagged openings to peer into abandoned homes. Bare stripes of light illuminated confusing scenes of tables tossed to the side and even cups strewn across the floor. Was there a race to leave? An earthquake?

The Sassi seemed to strike each of us in different ways. I felt like I could linger there forever until suddenly I had to get out before those crumbling walls closed in on me. I began to prefer viewing the Sassi from the Piano, removed a bit from the prickling vibes. I liked those slivers of Sassi I could see from the archways, while still tethered to the alive area of Matera—with its men with their black purses and cabbie hats gathered on park benches, the kids riding scooters through the grand piazza, the women in a clutch outside the bakery. I realized, I needed to digest the Sassi in small bites.

Like me, Keith stopped, open-mouthed, every time we passed an archway that opened onto a view of the Sassi. He wondered at the architecture, what it meant for the lives of people who lived there. He’s the one who asked questions of the curator of the Sassi museum, which is comprised of several cave dwellings connected together and filled with artifacts from the lives and occupations of people who once lived there. After walking through a room full of blacksmith materials, a room filled with sewing supplies, a room done up like a bedroom of the day, etc, Keith asked where the entrances to the original homes were, prompting the curator to walk us back through the museum, showing us how the houses had once been laid out.

Donato Cascione himself grew up in the Sassi, just up the hill, but in a less economically depressed accommodation. As he showed us one of the homes, the entirety of which could fit in my bedroom, through to the smaller room in the back for the animals, Donato told us that his friend had grown up in this house. Dark, so dark—he murmured that he wouldn’t have been able to last a week. He listed the diseases common in a place with so little air movement, so little light, and so little money.

His eyes blurred with tears, and I felt mine do the same. We bought his book (you can, too! I found it on Amazon later…our version is in Italian and English, I think the ones available on Amazon are one or the other), and when he found out I was a writer, he told me that trying to write a whole novel would drive him crazy—so many words to focus on! No, he preferred short stories and poems. We talked a little longer, and then took our leave with sadness. A sadness that lingered, and became twined with the Sassi. For me anyway. For Keith, it’s more of an intellectual curiosity. Then again, I can’t stay in the coliseum for more than a few minutes and I encourage sensitive people to nod at it from the outside, rather than feeling they “must see” the inside. Some places are just intense. 

The emotional aspects of the Sassi hit the kids almost not at all. Siena stopped at all frescos and listened patiently, her eyes rapt, at the stories. She railed at the injustice of paying to move people from their homes, rather than give them money to improve their lives, likening it to the state paying foster parents to pay for a child’s upkeep rather than giving the parent money to help raise their child.

Gabe pretended more interest than he had. When I let my imaginations pull me through the Sassi, he wanted to lean over the edge to speculate what animals were those at the bottom of the ravine. Could they be cows? He heard bells. So probably cows. Or maybe goats? Big goats though, right? Were there big goats?

I bit back my irritation. Who cares what kind of animal that is?  Don’t you see this? Eventually I settled into a place of accepting that an enormously heady place like Matera was going to settle into everyone’s consciousness differently, and it wasn’t my job to cruise direct other people’s experience.

So I let Gabe pull Siena to the wall, where they leaned out to listen to the bells on what they decided must, in fact, be cows, while I wandered, not doing much more than soaking it in in my own way.

One thing we all agreed on is that the Piano was pretty fantastic. I had wondered, on the drive, what it would be like to have a town on the edge of an emotional precipice like the Sassi, like having one foot in a graveyard. I figured people would be surly, a protective measure against the pulling abyss outside their doors. I imagined a pall over the populace.  

What can I deduce after a three day visit? Nothing of substance, but it certainly seemed like my assumptions were ill founded. On the contrary, it seemed like the awareness of humans’ frailty grounded the townspeople. Again, I make no assumptions, I’m basing this off what the Sassi did for me. Those windows from the pink and yellow Piano to the bleached and quiet Sassi, were a constant reminder of our human vulnerability and our human adaptability.

I must not be the only person who feels that, after all there is a Dali exhibit in Matera called, “The Persistence of Opposites.” It strikes me that, though I was never able to gleen any information about a connection between Dali and Matera, nonetheless, Matera seems sprung from Dali’s mind.

And what of those peppers that first captured my imagination? Well, let us get down to brass tacks. The food.

We had one meal on the edge of the Sassi and one in a cave in the Piano and both were memorable for mostly peasant ingredients, thoughtfully and deliciously executed. One of my favorites, from Osteria MateraMi (aside from their astounding antipasti platter, and by now you know how I feel about those, with novel flavors like marinated zucchini with crushed pistacchios and a kind of panzanella with jammy red onions and burrata cheese), was cavatellini (miniature pasta shaped a bit like hot dog buns) with baccala and black chickpeas and my first taste of peperoni cruschi in the classic preparation, mixed with breadcrumbs. I lingered on the pepper-laced breadcrumbs, which mostly just added an evocative smoky finish to each glorious bite. Can I just note again, for the record, how amazing it is to get food like this, food that nourishes the mind and body and spirit, for €9,00 or about $10 USD?

By the time we ate our second restaurant meal in Matera, at Osteria L’Arco, I’d become an old hand at peperoni cruschi. I’d purchased them at a bar and also at a grocery store, and found myself more and more enamored with the juxtaposition of salty and sweet, smoky and tangy, crisp and soft. Like Matera herself, these peppers sang with contrasts. So I ordered the pasta with peperoni cruschi and ricotta. Delicious!

Later, when I realized I’d ordered my dinner pizza without looking at the specials and realized I’d missed an opportunity to order a pizza with peperoni cruschi, sausage, onions, and olives, I almost just ordered an extra pizza just to have one more hit of those peppers.

The bread in Matera is also notable. First of all, it’s enormous. Bakers set up a loaf on a barrel or table outside their shops and it’s pretty show-stopping. The hard, floury crust yields to a crumb that is rich and stretchy and full of flavor. We brought a hunk home with us to continue our mornings of bread and jam, and I’ve bookmarked this recipe from Katie Parla, replicating it, albeit in more diminutive dimensions.

Within twenty minutes of entering the Sassi, Keith insisted that we stay an extra day. And thank goodness we did. For one, the extra day of meals was a bonus—Matera was one taste delight after another. For another, with his work schedule, Keith would only have had that one half-day exploring Matera, which would not have been enough. We made full use of that final day, which is when we went to the museum, when we stumbled across a market, when we got fantastic pizza (these people really do know their way around dough), when Siena decided that Matera was her favorite stop on our trip to Puglia and Basilicata, when we bantered good naturedly with our waiter at lunch and relished in that small connection. In short, that final day was when the ghosts of the Sassi retreated enough for us to understand that Matera is more than a sad story.

It’s a human story.

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