Matera

Matera is probably the longest continuously inhabited settlement in Europe: people have lived in the caves of this ravine for nine thousand years. It is also the only Italian city to have gone, in seventy years, from being called in Parliament “the national shame” to being European Capital of Culture. In 1952 an act of the state ordered its forced evacuation: sixteen thousand people were moved into new districts, and the Sassi stood empty for thirty years. Knowing that before you arrive changes the visit: those houses were abandoned by decree and reinhabited by choice.
The structure has no equal. The houses are partly cut into the rock and partly extended forward with the stone taken out by digging, stacked down the slope of a canyon: the roof of one house is the street or the courtyard of the one above. There are no streets in the normal sense, only routes that run over rooftops — which is why, wandering, you keep ending up on terraces that are somebody’s house. Underneath, invisible, lies the other half: a system of cisterns and channels that made it possible to live for nine thousand years in an area with no rivers.
Two practical things. The shoes: there are no flat streets here, only stairways of polished limestone that is slippery, and the city is hard work. The heat: in July and August the white stone reflects the sun and the Sassi go above 38 degrees with no shade at all.
With one day you see the two Sassi, the Palombaro Lungo — a cistern fifteen metres high beneath the main square, rediscovered by accident in 1991 — a cave house furnished as it was, and sunset from the far side of the ravine. With three you cross the canyon on foot into the Murgia Park, where Greek monks cut over a hundred and fifty churches from the eighth century onwards, and reach the Crypt of Original Sin, with frescoes from around the year 1000 in a cave that was a sheep stall until the 1960s.