Matera

Where it sits. Matera stands on the eastern edge of Basilicata, close to the Apulian border and about 65 kilometres inland from Bari, on the lip of the Gravina di Matera — a limestone canyon roughly 200 metres deep cut by a seasonal torrent. The old town, the Sassi, occupies the canyon's western flank, spilling down in terraces of caves and houses toward the water; across the ravine rises the empty Murgia plateau, a stony pastoral landscape holding more than 150 rock-cut churches. The stone is calcarenite, soft enough to be dug with hand tools and hard enough to stand: the fundamental fact about Matera is that its buildings and the rock they sit in are the same material, and the boundary between excavated and constructed is impossible to draw by eye.

The story behind it. People have lived in these caves more or less continuously for something like nine thousand years, which makes Matera one of the oldest continuously inhabited settlements on earth. Two Sassi districts, Barisano to the north and Caveoso to the south, flank the Civita spur, where the thirteenth-century cathedral stands in Apulian Romanesque with a 52-metre bell tower. By the twentieth century the caves had become a national embarrassment: families shared single rooms with their animals, there was no running water, malaria was endemic and infant mortality was catastrophic. Carlo Levi's Christ Stopped at Eboli, published in 1945, put the conditions in front of the country; in 1952 a special law ordered the Sassi cleared, and some fifteen thousand people were moved to new districts built on the plateau. The old town stood almost empty for thirty years. Legislation in 1986 encouraged its repopulation, UNESCO inscribed it in 1993, and Matera served as European Capital of Culture in 2019.

On screen. No other town in southern Italy has been filmed as heavily, and its screen identity is almost entirely as somewhere else. Pier Paolo Pasolini used the Sassi as Jerusalem in Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (1964), the film that established the convention. Mel Gibson shot The Passion of the Christ (2004) here, staging the Via Dolorosa through the alleys and using nearby Craco and Ginosa; The Nativity Story (2006), the 2016 remake of Ben-Hur and Mary Magdalene (2018) followed the same logic. Wonder Woman (2017) used Matera for the village on Themyscira. In 2021 No Time to Die opened its pre-title sequence here, sending James Bond's Aston Martin DB5 through the Sassi and spinning it in the piazza in front of the rock church of San Pietro Caveoso under machine-gun fire, before a motorcycle jump off the ravine wall — a two-month shoot that closed much of the old town. The result is a place most travellers recognise before they have ever heard its name.

What you actually see today. The Sassi are a maze of stepped lanes on multiple levels, and the single most useful thing to grasp is that many rooftops are also streets. Casa Grotta di Vico Solitario is a cave house furnished as it was before the 1952 evacuation, with the stall, the loom and the raised bed, and it explains the whole history in ten minutes. Santa Maria de Idris and Santa Lucia alle Malve are rock churches with Byzantine-influenced frescoes; Casa Noha, run by the Italian environmental trust FAI, gives the town's story as a projection onto its own walls. Under Piazza Vittorio Veneto lies the Palombaro Lungo, a vast rock-cut cistern 15 metres deep, entered on a guided visit. The classic panorama is from the Murgia Timone belvedere across the ravine, reached by road or by the footbridge and path down through the gorge.

Getting there and timing. Matera famously has no connection to the national rail network; the narrow-gauge Ferrovie Appulo Lucane line runs from Bari in about ninety minutes on weekdays, with buses covering weekends, and coaches serve Bari airport, Naples and Rome. The Sassi are stairs from end to end, steep, uneven and slippery when wet, and step-free access is confined to a few upper streets. April to early June and September to October are the sensible windows; July and August are fiercely hot on unshaded stone, and winter can be cold and greasy underfoot. The Festa della Bruna on 2 July, in which a decorated papier-mâché cart is paraded and then torn apart by the crowd, is the town's own event and not a staged one.

A caution and a reward. Matera's transformation from national shame to film set and design hotel is only forty years old, and the conversion of caves into boutique accommodation has been fast enough to worry the people who remember the evacuation. Visiting well means spending part of the time on the unglamorous side of that story — Casa Grotta, Casa Noha, the rehousing districts on the plateau — rather than only on the panorama. The panorama earns its reputation regardless: from the Murgia belvedere at dusk, as the lights come on across the ravine, the town reads as one continuous object rather than a collection of buildings.