An urban interpretation of nature: �e Sassi of Matera (Basilicata, Italy). Medieval rock art in South of Europe

Francesco Foschino1

1 · MateraHUB (http://www.materahub.com/)

ISSN 1699-0889http://cuadernosdearterupestre.es

CUADERNOS DE ARTE RUPESTRE, 7, 2014: 233-244

I N F O R M A C I Ó N • I N F O R M A T I O NA B S T R A C T

The Sassi of Matera and the Park of the Murgia are a UNESCO World Heritage Site sin-ce 1993. It has been the first Italian site included in the list to be located southern of Rome.

The Sassi, literally meaning “districts dug into the rock”, are a human settlement conti-nuously inhabited since prehistoric times.

Keywords

Southern Italy, Basilicata Region, Medieval Rock Art, UNESCO World Heritage, European Capital of Culture, Tourism, Valorisation of Cultural Heritage

Received · June 2015Accepted · November 2015Revised · May 2016

Palabras clave

Sur de Italia, Región de Basilicata, Arte Rupestre medieval, Patrimonio Mundial de la UNESCO, Capital Europea de la Cultura, Valorización Cultural del Patrimonio Cultural

Recibido · Junio 2015Aceptado · Noviembre 2015Revisado · Mayo 2016

R E S U M E N

Los Sassi de Matera y el Parque de la Murgia son lugares inscritos en la Lista de Patri-monio Mundial de la UNESCO desde 1993. Ha sido el primer bien italiano situado al sur de Roma en ser incorporado a la Lista.

Los Sassi, literlamente “barrios excavados en la roca”, son asentamientos continua-mente ocupados por seres humanos desde época prehistórica.

Una interpretación urbana de la naturaleza: los Sassi de Matera (Basilicata, Italia). Arte rupestre medieval en el sur de Europa

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1. PRESENTATION OF THE SITE

On the sides of a deep canyon called Gravina, the Man

has been digging caves since the Paleolitic age, as the

rock is a soft sedimentary limestone, easy to dig just using

a harder rock: no metal tools are necessary. Few caves are

natural: most of them are man-made. Along with caves, also

trenched villages and monumental graves were built and

dug on the surrounding high plateau, currently part of the

Murgia Park, in the Neolitic Age. Meanwhile a great area

and a high number of caves are still intact and unchanged

since the Prehistoric age, many of them have been modi-

fied, enlarged and used until today.

The so called “Grotta dei Pipistrelli” or “Cave of the Bats”

holds the oldest findings of the area, dating at the Acheulan

Age, but the whole area gave the archeologist artifacts from

all prehistoric ages, clearly sings of a never interrupted hu-

man presence over the millennia.

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The great gorge, or canyon where most of the caves are

dug into, called Gravina, is mostly surrounded by this soft

limestone rock, which is not suitable for agriculture, and

does not provide any source of water. Just for a few hun-

dred meters, and just on one side of the canyon, we face

a different soil, suitable for agriculture and source for many

springs of water.

It was exactly in this area that the town of Matera was es-

tablished, relying on a good amount of water springs and a

close distance to the fields where agriculture was possible,

and being for the most part surrounded by the depth of the

gorge, it was a perfect natural protection. All the caves insi-

de this area, the current old town, whose digging started in

the Paleolitic Age, have been modified, used and enlarged

until today. The caves out of the current city limits of Matera,

had two different destinies: many of them were abandoned

and look frozen as they used to be thousand of years ago, or

they became part of small medieval rock villages, most of the

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Figures 1-2 · Sassi di Matera. Photo by APT Basilicata

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times as part of cattle raising facilities or places for worship.

Throughout the centuries, the caves located in the town

served different purposes.

First of all, the were used as quarries: indeed the excava-

tions provided blocks to build, so that every building was self

building itself taking the blocks from the enlargement of the

caves beyond them. Even though it is a soft rock, easy to dig,

it is compact enough to build with it.

A fundamental purpose of the excavations was the crea-

tion of water storages and filtering facilities. Every cave is

provided with two or more water reservoirs, mainly collecting

rain water from the roofs of the building next to them and from

the courtyard. The water is first collected into a 4 meter deep

water reservoir, dug into the rock and plastered with “coccio

pesto”, a special waterproof plaster. When the first reservoir

is completely full, and all the sediments have settled down

to the bottom, the upper part of the water, the cleanest one,

flows into a second water reservoir through a pipe.

The second reservoir receives a cleaner water than the first

one. While the minimum number of the reservoir is two, as the

first one is always and only a filter, many caves are provided

with 3 or more reservoirs, up to six, all of them connected on the

top, the last one receiving the cleanest water only when all the

previous ones are completely full. These cisterns are private

properties of the owners of the cave, so the public institutions

provided the citizens, since the early Middle age, with public

water reservoirs, dug into the rock and plastered with “coc-

cio pesto” as the private ones, but much bigger in size, and

located on the base of the fertile hills, thus collecting mostly

spring water, and not only rain water as the private ones.

The biggest public water reservoir has got a capacity of 5 mi-

llions liters of water, with a depth of 16 meters and a length of 50

meters and is located under the current main square of Matera.

As the caves hold particular climatic conditions, as cons-

tant temperature at roughly 15 degrees, darkness and humi-

dity, they are very efficient places for many productions, such

as wine cellars, olive oil mills, tanneries for leather, cheese

storages, wheat and beans storages.

So far we counted more than 150 caves in the Matera area,

that have been used, at least once in their lifetime, as places

for worship: churches, private chapels, funeral chapels.

Indeed each cave served in history for different purpo-

ses, according to the owner and the century, so the very

same cave might have been a church in the early middle

age, an olive oil mill in the renaissance, a wine cellar in the

18th century, a house in the 19th century.

Every time the purpose of the cave changed, the shape

of the cave was modified and enlarged, but most traces

of the previous usages survived the change.

Most caves in town were indeed used as proper hou-

ses, a process mostly starting in the 19th century, when

the industrial revolution acted on two sides:

1. The agriculture became capitalistic and extensive, so

the farmers formerly living in the fields were moved away

by the noblemen (the new owners of the fields who re-

placed the Church) and were hired as field-workers.

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Figures 3-4 · Sassi di Matera. Photo by APT Basilicata

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2. The caves were not competitive anymore as productive

facilities, as they suffered the competition of industries

and machines. The combined effect was that hundreds

of farmers moved from the fields to the town looking for

houses, and they ended up renting the caves, who had

slowly been abandoned as productive places and were

reconverted into houses. As the farmers were still pea-

sants, though they were working in somebody else’s

field, they needed a donkey as a mean of transporta-

tion to reach the far-away fields, and the animal had its

own place in the cave itself, together with the family.

The climatic conditions of the caves were not healthy

for human life, and the cohabitation with the donkey

made things even worse. In 1952, 30.000 people lived

in town, 18 thousands of them in the Sassi area: 4.000

of them in the caves and 14.000 in the built parts.

The bad living conditions of the people living in caves

were described in a popular book: “Christ stopped at

Eboli” by Carlo Levi, so the whole nation knew about the

situation in the Sassi of Matera. Scholars, journalists and

politicians came in town, and Matera was known as “the

disgrace of Italy”.

The first government of the new Italian Republic wrote a

law in 1952, ordering the total evacuation of the Sassi area,

and the mandatory relocation of 18.000 people. It was the

first time in history for such a measure to be undertaken

without any natural disaster occurred. In a few years the

whole population of the Sassi was relocated in new areas

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Figure 5 · Duomo. Photo by APT Basilicata

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of town. The people buying a new house somewhere else

kept the old property; the people that could not afford a

new house, or did not want to buy one, got a new house

for free by the government in purpose-built new districts,

losing the old properties which became public owned. In

this way, 80% of the people got a house from the govern-

ment which consequently owns 80% of the Sassi buildings

and caves. Indeed, this is the only historical center in Eu-

rope which is government-owned.

Regarded as the symbol of a shameful and miserable

past, the entire Sassi area was completely abandoned.

Buildings start collapsing, rock churches were vanda-

lized, frescoes were stolen, many caves were used as

damps and other ones were illegally occupied. Sassi

became soon an off-limits area, a ghost town in the

heart of a living town.

A few voices started raising to protect this incredible

heritage from a destiny of neglect and destruction. A

group of young people established “La Scaletta” asso-

ciation, and for the first time in history all rock churches

in town were studied, mapped and catalogued, a mas-

sive work done by the association members. The City of

Matera asked the international community to give ideas

on the future of the Sassi in 1977, and finally in 1986 the

Italian Republic with a special Law decided to underline

the importance of the site and to bring the life back to

the Sassi area.

Figure 6 · SS Crocifisso alla selva, rupestrian Church. Photo by APT Basilicata

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Figure 7 · Parco della Murgia Materana. Photo by APT BasilicataFigure 8 · Cripta del Peccato Originale. Photo by Fondazione Zétema di Matera

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The Sassi had to be inhabited again, all the infrastrac-

tures such as sewage, electricity, water, gas had to be

implemented. All families owning a property were allowed

to renovate it, and the vast properties of the State had to

be given for 30 years as a free leasing to anyone willing

to renovate it. The process of re-inhabit an abandoned

town, using the very same abandoned buildings, walls and

caves, had never been tried before: in order to help the

pioneers, the State was paying for half of the cost of the

restoration.

In 1993, to boost the change of perspective towards

the Sassi, Matera applied to become a Unesco World

Heritage Site, and became the 8th italian site to be in-

cluded in the list. From being “the disgrace of Italy” to

be recgnized as a “World Heritage”, a giant leap was

undertaken by the town.

So far more than 60% of the Sassi properties have been

renovated, hosting residents, offices, hotels, restaurants,

shops, craftsmen workshops, renovated rock churches.

Two thousands people currently live in the area. Tourism

boosted and Matera has become one of the top tourist des-

tinations in Italy, and is currently one of the remaining six

candidates for the title of European Capital of Culture for

2019.

Matera has big challenges to face, such as the sustai-

nability of the restoration process, not to spoil the identity

in order to increase tourism, keep a good standard of life 8

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Figure 9 · Cripta Peccato Originale, absidi. Photo by Fondazione Zétema di Matera

for the residents, manage the car traffic and govern the

mobility of thousands of people in a delicate environment.

2. THE ROCK ART IN THE SITE – CONSERVATION OF THE MONUMENT

As the vast majority of the caves are man-made, we

might think of their architecture as a first example of art,

where the “negative architecture” was implemented, as

to create shapes and rooms, rock needs to be remo-

ved instead of blocks to be added. Prehistoric caves,

medieval churches, wine cellars, olive oil mills, houses

have been dug along the millennia. Among the most im-

pressive rock architecture, in the Murgia Park there are

13 “trenched villages” where in the 5th millennia BC a

deep trench was dug, usually in the shape of the figure

8. Inside the trench a few holes for posts where found,

creating circular structures for holding huts. In the same

area, many tombs dating to 3.000 BC have been found,

composed of a little man-dug grotto (indeed they are

called “grotticella” tomb) and sometimes surrounded by

circles of stones.

As of “rock art” in the classical sense, the oldest exam-

ple in the Matera area is a painting in the “Selva” area, just

15 km from the current town where in the 3rd millennia BC,

three red figures were painted directly on the rock, repre-

senting three men dancing or running.

As most prehistoric caves have been used in the fo-

llowing millennia, we have many findings of artifacts, tools,

vases, bones and weapons but no other rock art examples.

We have to wait the 9th century AD to experience another

example of rock art properly called. It is the “Crypt of the

original sin”, a place of worship dug and painted during the

long-bard kingdom and portraying frescoes on the first book

of the Bible, thus the creation of light, the creation of the

Man and the Woman, and the original sin. Three apses hold

wonderful frescoes of Saint Peter, Mary and Saint Micheal,

each one of them honored by two more saints on their sides.

There are 40 square meters of fresco in total, and dating to

the 9th century, this is one of the most important example of

the long-bard art still existing in Europe.

Many more rock churches have been cataloged and stu-

died, and some of them still hold original frescoes. As each

cave has been used for different purposes along its history,

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241Figure 10 · Madonna delle Virtù, rupestrian Church. Photo by Circolo La Scaletta MateraFigure 11 · MUSMA, Museum of Contemporary Sculpture. Photo by Fondazione Zétema di MateraFigure 12 · Rupestrian Church. Photo by APT Basilicata

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Figure 13 · Vergine Basilissa. Photo by Fondazione Zétema di Matera.Figure 14 · San Nicola, fresco in the rupestrian Church. Photo by APT Basilicata.Figure 15 · Artigianianato. Photo by APT Basilicata

we can say that we have more than 100 caves that once in

their lifetime have been used as churches, or chapels, and

they still hold clear sings of their previous usage.

Meanwhile in the past scholars thought that these rock

churches were dug and inhabited by monks coming from

East, the modern searches clearly show, undoubtedly, that

all of them were part of the local history and share the same

artists, pilgrims, and destiny of the built ones and that no

monk coming from East ever came to Matera.

Most of the valuable paintings on the rocky walls in the

rock churches were painted between the 12th and the

15th century. As in Matera the Latin and the Greek rite

coexisted up to the 17th century, most of the frescoes

represent byzantine icons, depicted with a local nuance.

Deesis, Kiriotissa, Glikofilousa, Galaktotrophousa, Pan-

tocrator, Basilissa, most of the common byzantine icons

have been painted in Matera. Most of them are still “in

situ”, meanwhile a small part have been vandalized in the

last 50 years, or were stolen. In a few cases the stolen

frescoes have been rescued and they are currently on

display in the local museum.

Besides the valuable byzantine icons, other rock chur-

ches, with Latin rite, hold frescoes with different subject

and style, as crucifixions, scenes of miracles and catholic

saints. In all of these cases, the rock art is not different

from the art created in the built churches. The real diffe-

rence is in the preservation. Indeed the architecture of the

rock churches may cross the centuries much easier than

the built one: they do not collapse, they are not destroyed

but only modified in case of a new usage. On the con-

trary, the rock art is more diffiult to preserve, as most rock

churches are humid and so bacteria and salts mine the

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integrity of the fresco, and as most of them are isolated

and with free public access, their integrity is at risk every

day for vandalizing acts.

The most important ones have been correctly restored in

recent years, and the restoration of the Crypt of the Origi-

nal Sin is particularly interesting as it has been made with

private funds, it is constantly controlled and monitored, it

goes under a planned 5 years maintenance and has been

thought as a perfect example of any intervention on rock

churches, as a code for any other future restoration.

Figure 13 · San Nicola dei Greci, rupestrian Church. Photo by Circolo La Scaletta Matera