MONDAY, JUNE 17
Matera captured my imagination. No longer did I feel it’s despair. Instead it emerged as a city of defiance and pride. After hours of wandering sinuous lanes, and peering into musty caves and the deep craggy ravine, I heard Matera’s stories told by whispering ghosts, swallows’ wings and windy updrafts from the river Gravina. The voices spoke of endurance and intensity, struggle and survival, life on dry stone hills, Paleolithic cave dwellers, monks and nuns, artists driven by passion to paint stone walls, seekers of safety, refuge and prayer.
It has all been here, 10,000 years of it…the remains of lives past, religious zeal, superstition, magic, and the human ability to survive storms, heat, plagues, conquests and poverty.
The starkness of this landscape is caressed by a surprisingly gentle air, dry and soft, which touches the skin like the hands of an aged healer. The rugged, craggy wrinkles and calluses on this land seem to hold an intrinsic power, a natural magnetic force that draws humans to it and won’t allow them to leave. Though harsh and austere, people have lived here for millennia. Somehow somewhere in this piece of earth magic exists.
A few things I learned….
- Matera is in the most unexplored region of Italy, Basilicata
- Sassi was a hiding place for monks, particularly the Byzantine followers of San Basilisk, and resisters from the 6th C onward.
- The name “Matera” is believed to be derived from the term Mother to honor Mother Earth.
- Until the Roman Empire, the people resisted all outside influence.
- The Normans, who arrived in 1042, built the city wall and castles, palazzos and churches. They put Matera on the map.
- In the 12th C. when many of the stone churches were carved from the stone, the Benedictine monks arrived in Matera.
- The 12th and 13th centuries brought great expansion to the city as it became a royal fiefdom. As more people arrived, the poor were forced out and moved into the grottos, called the Sassi.
- The decades after the city’s abandonment post WWII, Matera was known as La Citta Fantasma. It still holds the story of the ghosts.
- There are 155 cave churches, monasteries and shrines.
- The people from Matera believe garlic protects from evil, basil brings good fortune, and rosemary wards off gossip
