Matera cave churches

Where it sits. The Sassi are the two cave districts that fall away from the historic core of Matera into the Gravina ravine, in the eastern corner of Basilicata. Sasso Caveoso drops to the south, arranged in rough concentric tiers that recall a Roman theatre, which is where its name comes from. Sasso Barisano curves to the north-west, its facades more elaborate because it faced the road to Bari and prosperity arrived there first. Between them rises the Civita, the rock spur carrying the cathedral. All of it is cut into calcarenite, a soft marine limestone locally called tufo, which quarries out in blocks and can be carved with a pick. The result is a town that is simultaneously excavated and constructed: many houses are a masonry front bolted onto a cave that goes back thirty metres into the hillside.

How they were built. The logic is subtractive. Diggers hollowed a barrel-vaulted chamber, used the extracted blocks to raise a facade, and channelled every drop of rainwater from the roof into a cistern beneath the floor, since Matera has almost no surface water. Streets are frequently the roofs of the dwellings below, which is why the district reads as one continuous stepped surface rather than a grid. Interspersed among the houses are more than 150 rupestrian churches, cut and frescoed between roughly the eighth and fourteenth centuries by Byzantine-rite monks and later Latin communities. Santa Maria de Idris is driven into the Monterrone rock and connects by tunnel to the crypt of San Giovanni in Monterrone; San Pietro Barisano is the largest, with a sunken nave and drainage niches used for the ritual draining of corpses; the Madonna delle Virtù and San Nicola dei Greci complex sits on the far side of the torrent.

Abandonment and return. By 1950 around 15,000 people were living here, often one family and its livestock to a room, with no sewerage and a well-documented public-health emergency. A special law passed in 1952 under Alcide De Gasperi cleared the districts and moved residents to new estates, some of them designed by leading Italian architects. The Sassi were left empty and slowly collapsing for thirty years. Law 771 of 1986 funded conservation and offered long leases to anyone who would restore a dwelling, and UNESCO inscription in 1993 sealed the reversal. Today the districts hold hotels, workshops and restaurants alongside a resident population, and the conservation argument has shifted from ruin to over-commercialisation.

On screen. The Sassi carry the opening act of No Time to Die (2021). Bond and Madeleine Swann drive into Matera in the DB5; the visit to Vesper Lynd's grave triggers an ambush, and the chase runs directly through these districts. The DB5's 360-degree spin under fire, with concealed guns firing through the headlamps, was staged in Piazza San Pietro Caveoso, the small terrace in front of the church of San Pietro Caveoso where the ground simply stops and the Gravina opens up beyond the railing. The motorcycle jump, ridden by a stunt double on a Triumph Scrambler 1200 XE, used a ramp erected against a stone wall in the Sasso Caveoso. The production worked here for several weeks in 2019, sheathing paving and steps in protective decking. Earlier films used the same rock for biblical Jerusalem, notably Pasolini's The Gospel According to St Matthew (1964) and Gibson's The Passion of the Christ (2004), and the pattern is worth knowing before you visit: what looks ancient on camera is genuinely ancient, but the balconies and the tomb were dressing.

What you actually see today. Walk down from Piazza Vittorio Veneto or Piazza del Sedile and the change is immediate: asphalt gives way to worn limestone, and the route becomes a staircase. Reconstructed cave houses such as the Casa Grotta di Vico Solitario show the standard interior — a bed raised on a platform, a niche for infants, the mule stalled two metres away, a cistern mouth in the floor. The Vicinato a Pozzo is a communal courtyard built around a shared well. The best overview is from the Belvedere di Murgia Timone on the far rim, reached by car or on foot over the torrent by the suspension footbridge.

Getting there and timing. Access is on foot from the upper town; there is no vehicle route into the heart of either district, and even luggage is usually carried down. Wear grippy shoes, because the stone polishes to a shine and turns treacherous when wet. April to June and September to October are the comfortable months; July and August routinely pass 35 °C with no shade at all. Light is best in the late afternoon on Sasso Caveoso, and after dark the districts are lit low and warm.