Tag: Baslilicata

  • Sunday at Casa Grotta di Vico Solitario

    Strolling through the Sassi today one almost can´t imagine how living in the caves had been until the 1950ies. Whole families and their live stock lived cheeck by jowl, without running water and other modern facilities.

    It’s difficult to imagine that Matera’s ancient warren was known not too long ago as “the shame of Italy” for its dismal poverty. In the 1950s, the entire population of roughly 16,000 people, mostly peasants and farmers, were relocated from the Sassi to new housing projects in an ill-conceived government program, leaving it an empty shell. (Smithsonian Magazine)

    Today some of these former homes have been restored as little museums – like the Casa Grotto di Vico Solitario – for one or two Euros you´ll get a little glimpse of what life may have looked liked. Inhabited until 1957 by Vico Solitario, his family and his animals.

    The Casa Grotta tells the story of the people that lived in the Sassi. In the large one room area, partly dug out of the rock and partly constructed, the furniture is positioned so as to create smaller areas: the hearth with the stove, a small table in the centre of the room, a bed with two iron trestles on which wooden planks were placed, supporting a mattress made out of corn leaves.
    In front of the bed, in between the cave walls, there was a trough where the mule was tied. A round hole was used as a cesspit, or as a place to keep straw. (Case Museuo Italia)

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  • Sasso Caveoso

    Ever since I saw this one picture of the Sassi di Matera on Instagram this spring, I wanted to see them myself. I already had planned to go to Naples in the autumn and just changed the travelplans. Even that the Sassi di Matera and the Park of the Rupestrian Churches have been considered World Heritage Site by the UNESCO in 1993 and Matera will be European Capital of Culture in 2019 it was quite hard to find narrow travelguides about the city and the sassi. But every travelogue I read about the Sassi die Matera stated how the first view of the cave dwellings leaves one speechless, which actually happened – and to be honest it hasn´t got better. Even know as I´m trying to narrow down my photographs from my days in Matera I have no idea where to start. So let´s join me on my walk through the Sasso Caveoso.

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    The area of Matera has been settled since the Palaeolithic Age, the city itself was founded by the Romans in the 3rd century BC.

    First occupied in the Paleolithic Age, the myriad natural caves were gradually burrowed deeper and expanded into living spaces by peasants and artisans throughout the classical and medieval eras…. “The Sassi are like a Swiss cheese, riddled with tunnels and caverns,” remarks Peppino Mitarotonda, an artist who works on renovations with a local cultural group, the Zétema Foundation. “What you see on the surface is only 30 percent. The other 70 percent is hidden.” (The Smithonianmag)

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    View from Piazza Pascoli – San Pietro Caveoso

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    San Petro Caveoso – seen from my apartement, which was quite in between Sasso Caveoso and Sasso Barisano

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