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About this guide: This guide to the history of Matera was written by the Italian-born travel specialists at Trips 2 Italy, a custom tour operator that has designed hand-crafted Italian vacations since 2003. Every recommendation below reflects the same first-hand knowledge our team draws on when we build a private Matera itinerary around a traveler’s interests, dates, and pace. Read it for your research, then let us translate it into a trip designed entirely around you.
Matera’s human story reaches back more than nine thousand years, making it one of the oldest continuously inhabited settlements in the world. Neolithic communities settled the caves and defended villages on the Murgia plateau above the ravine, and their successors never left; they simply kept digging, generation after generation, until the caves became a city.
The evidence is written across the landscape. Across the Gravina di Matera, the plateau preserves entrenched Neolithic villages, cave dwellings, and rock art, while the National Archaeological Museum in the city, named for the scholar Domenico Ridola, displays the flints, ceramics, and grave goods that document the long ascent from prehistory through the Greek centuries of the nearby Ionian coast.
This deep continuity is what separates Matera from every other historic city in Basilicata and beyond. Rome grew over its ancient self; Matera still inhabits its own beginning. Standing in a cave chamber that has sheltered people since before the pyramids, then stepping out into a functioning modern city, is an experience of time travelers describe for the rest of their lives.
Archaeologists continue to refine the details, but the essential fact is settled: Matera’s caves were home long before most of the ancient world’s famous cities existed. The city wears the number lightly, without staging or spectacle, which is precisely why the antiquity lands so powerfully. It is simply there, in the smoke-darkened ceiling of a cave chapel, in a stairway worn to a smooth slope, in a cistern still holding water.
Between roughly the eighth and thirteenth centuries, Matera’s ravine became a monastic landscape. Greek-speaking Byzantine monks, moving west through southern Italy, joined Benedictine communities in carving churches, hermitages, and monasteries from the soft stone, painting their sanctuaries with frescoes of saints, Madonnas, and biblical cycles in the Eastern manner.
More than one hundred fifty of these rupestrian churches survive in and around the city, from Santa Lucia alle Malve, the first settlement of Benedictine nuns in Matera, to the crypts and sanctuaries scattered across the Murgia plateau. Their frescoes, including the celebrated Creation cycle of the Crypt of Original Sin, form one of Europe’s most important galleries of early medieval painting.
The monks left more than art. They organized the slope, terracing gardens, managing water, and establishing the pattern of sacred and domestic spaces that the growing city would inherit. When travelers walk from a frescoed cave church into a neighboring cave dwelling, they are reading the collaboration between monastic and peasant Matera that built the Sassi we see today.
The monastic centuries also tied Matera into a wider Mediterranean world, as Greek and Latin Christianity met and mingled in these valleys. Scholars still trace Eastern iconography and Latin dedications side by side in the painted sanctuaries, and travelers with a taste for early medieval art find in Matera a concentration of it matched by few places in Europe, all of it reachable on foot or by a short drive.
The Civita, the fortified spur between the two Sassi, is Matera’s medieval acropolis. Normans took the city in the eleventh century, drawing it into the feudal world of southern Italy’s kingdoms, and in the thirteenth century the city crowned its highest point with a cathedral in the Apulian Romanesque style, completed around 1270 and dedicated to the Madonna della Bruna, the patroness Matera still celebrates every July 2.
The cathedral’s carved rose window and fifty-two-meter campanile became the city’s landmark, visible from every tier of the Sassi, and its interior gathered the centuries: a Byzantine-style Madonna fresco, a sixteenth-century stone nativity, and baroque splendor layered over the Romanesque bones. Around it, noble families raised palazzi along the Civita’s spine, looking down over the cave quarters below.
Matera’s later centuries brought rank and growth. The city served as the capital of Basilicata from 1663 until 1806, a period that endowed the Piano with baroque churches and dignified squares, while the Sassi kept expanding down the slope as the peasant city carved ever deeper. The two Materas, palace above and cave below, would define the drama of the modern era.
Traces of every era remain walkable. The Tramontano castle stands unfinished on its hill above the Piano, a monument to the count whose harsh rule the Materans ended in a 1514 uprising, while the Civita’s lanes keep their medieval narrowness and the cathedral square its ceremonial calm. Our historian guides thread these centuries into a single unhurried walk, so the city’s whole feudal story unfolds between two espressos.
Matera’s greatest engineering achievement is invisible from the street. In a limestone landscape with no river through the town, survival depended on harvesting rain, and over centuries the Materans perfected a system of collection surfaces, terracotta channels, settling basins, and bell-shaped cisterns that threaded the entire slope, storing water in the cool dark beneath nearly every dwelling.
The masterpiece is the Palombaro Lungo, the great cistern excavated beneath Piazza Vittorio Veneto and enlarged through the nineteenth century until it could hold roughly five million liters, with vaults plunging more than fifteen meters below the promenade. Rediscovered in 1991 and now visited by walkway, it is often called a water cathedral, its carved chambers echoing above green, glass-clear depths.
This hydraulic intelligence is central to why UNESCO honored Matera in 1993 as an outstanding example of a settlement in harmony with its ecosystem. Touring the cisterns with a guide who can read the system, from rooftop collection to neighborhood sharing in the vicinati, reveals the Sassi as a masterpiece of resourcefulness refined over thousands of years.
The system even shaped social life: collecting, sharing, and guarding water structured the day of every vicinato, and rain was watched with an intensity the coasts never knew. When modern aqueducts reached the city in the twentieth century, they ended a discipline of scarcity that had governed the slope for millennia, and the great cisterns slipped quietly into memory until their rediscovery astonished the modern city.
By the early twentieth century the ancient system had been overwhelmed. The Sassi’s population had grown far beyond what the caves could healthily hold, and Carlo Levi’s 1945 memoir Christ Stopped at Eboli brought national attention to conditions in the south, describing the cave districts with a force that stirred Italy’s conscience.
In 1952 the Italian government passed a special law for Matera, and through the following decade some fifteen thousand residents moved from the caves into new neighborhoods built on the plateau, designed by leading architects and planners of the day. The Sassi, inhabited for nine millennia, fell largely silent, held in trust by the state while the city debated their future.
Painful as the uprooting was for the communities involved, the moment became the hinge of Matera’s rebirth. The new quarters gave families modern homes, the emptied Sassi survived intact rather than being demolished, and a generation of Materans grew up asking how to bring the old city honorably back to life. Their answer would make Matera one of Europe’s great stories of renewal.
Visitors sometimes ask whether the story should sadden them, and Materans generally answer no. The relocation is remembered here as a hard passage that led somewhere good, and many families hold both truths at once: affection for the vicinato world of their grandparents and gratitude for what followed. Hearing that perspective firsthand, from guides whose own families lived it, is one of the most valuable hours a traveler can spend in the city.
The turning point came in 1986, when a new national law reversed course and funded the recovery of the Sassi, inviting residents, artisans, and cultural ventures to restore and reinhabit the stone. Slowly at first, then with gathering confidence, the caves filled again with life: studios, homes, cultural spaces, and rooms for travelers carved into the ancient fabric with scrupulous care.
International recognition followed. In 1993 UNESCO inscribed the Sassi and the park of rupestrian churches as a World Heritage Site, the first in southern Italy, and in 2014 Matera won its bid to serve as European Capital of Culture for 2019, a year of exhibitions, music, and global attention that announced the city’s transformation to the world.
Today Matera stands as proof that heritage and hope can be the same project. The city that was once cited as the south’s great challenge is now its great emblem, studied by planners, loved by travelers, and inhabited by people fiercely proud of both the stone and the story. Visiting now means witnessing a renaissance still unfolding, one restored cave at a time.
The renaissance is also intimate in scale. Restoration in the Sassi proceeds cave by cave, each project negotiating between conservation and daily life, and walking the districts today you can read the whole spectrum, from freshly inhabited dwellings to raw chambers awaiting their turn. It gives the city a living-workshop quality that fully polished destinations rarely offer, and it makes every return visit slightly different from the last.
Begin in a Casa Grotta, one of the furnished cave dwellings that recreate domestic life as it was before the 1950s, with the bed raised on iron legs, the loom, the cistern beneath the floor, and the stable alcove beside the kitchen. In a single small chamber, the entire social history of the Sassi becomes tangible in a way no book can match.
Then descend into the Palombaro Lungo beneath the main piazza, climb to the cathedral on the Civita, and give a morning to the frescoed churches: Madonna de Idris on its crag, Santa Lucia alle Malve, and, by reservation, the Crypt of Original Sin outside town. The Ridola museum’s archaeology and Palazzo Lanfranchi’s art collections, including Carlo Levi’s monumental Lucania paintings, complete the arc.
Sequence is everything in a city with nine thousand years to tell, so we compose history itineraries chronologically, from prehistoric caves across the ravine to the restored present, with historian guides chosen for their narrative gift. We include Matera in many of our cultural tours, and its layered stone rewards every hour a curious traveler gives it.
Matera deserves more than a template. Since 2003, Trips 2 Italy has designed private Italian vacations one traveler at a time, hand selecting every experience based on what you tell us rather than fitting you into a predefined package. Our Italian-born team plans Matera with the knowledge of people who call Italy home, from the frescoed cave churches of the Sassi to the ravine trails of the Murgia park, and we remain at your side throughout your trip with 24/7 assistance. Tell us how you imagine Matera, and we will craft the itinerary that matches it.
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People have lived in and around Matera for more than nine thousand years, from Neolithic villages on the Murgia plateau to the continuously inhabited cave districts of the Sassi, making it one of the oldest living settlements on earth. The National Archaeological Museum in the city documents this extraordinary continuity.
The cave districts had become severely overpopulated, and after Carlo Levi’s writing drew national attention to conditions in the south, a 1952 law relocated about fifteen thousand residents to new modern quarters. The move preserved the Sassi intact and set the stage for the restoration movement that brought the old city back to life.
In 1993, when the Sassi and the park of the rupestrian churches were inscribed as an outstanding example of a human settlement living in harmony with its ecosystem, the first World Heritage listing in southern Italy. The recognition accelerated the restoration and return of life to the cave districts.
Matera held the title in 2019, chosen as the emblem of a city that transformed itself from hardship to cultural celebration within a single lifetime. The year filled the Sassi with exhibitions, music, and international attention, confirming the renaissance that restoration had been building since the 1980s.
It is the vast underground cistern beneath Piazza Vittorio Veneto, enlarged through the nineteenth century to hold roughly five million liters of harvested rainwater, with chambers plunging more than fifteen meters deep. Rediscovered in 1991, it is visited today by walkway, and Trips 2 Italy arranges guided descents as part of history-focused itineraries.
Yes. The Casa Grotta dwellings in Sasso Caveoso are furnished exactly as homes were before the 1950s relocation, from the raised bed to the stable alcove, and they make the social history of the Sassi vivid in minutes. We pair the visit with a historian guide who connects the single room to the city’s nine-thousand-year story.
