"You though we were just made up for a commercial, didn't you?"
Posted on 07/17/2006 12:07:20 PM PDT by blam
Posted on Mon, Jul. 17
Matera: A southern Italian town revives its ancient cave dwellings
By Carol Pucci
The Seattle Times
(MCT)
MATERA, Italy - Nicola Rizzi stands in front of his boyhood home where chickens and ducks used to wander, closes his eyes and smells bean soup and tomato sauce boiling on pots heated by wood fires.
He was 11, a survivor in a neighborhood of windowless caves and damp walls, where animals and humans slept side-by-side and half the children born there died, among them three of his brothers and sisters.
Mostly though, Rizzi remembers the smell of baking bread over olive-wood fires. His father owned a communal oven where people would bring their dough for him to bake into fat loaves big enough to last a week.
"It's a smell," says Rizzi, taking a deep breath, "that I still have in my mind."
It was the smell of home, a home that his family and 17,000 others, mostly poor peasant farmers, were forced by the government to evacuate in the early 1950s after Italian artist and writer Carlo Levi published an account of the squalid living conditions where they lived, not in regular houses, but in thousands-of-years-old cave dwellings called the sassi.
"Christ never came this far, nor did time, nor the individual soul, nor hope," Levi wrote in "Christ Stopped at Eboli," a book he authored during his political exile to the rural southern region of Basilicata in the mid-1930s. The title refers to the town of Eboli in neighboring Campania, suggesting that not even Christ could have ventured into an area so desolate as Basilicata, and certainly not to Matera.
(Excerpt) Read more at mercurynews.com ...
GGG Ping.
"You though we were just made up for a commercial, didn't you?"
Houses like this, dug into the sides of hillsides, are common in parts of Turkey as well. Many of them are still occupied. Indeed, such dwellings are found pretty much everywhere on Earth where the hills are of limestone. In a way, they make very good sense. They're cool in Summer and warmer in Winter. They take very little building materials, and some are quite large.
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Excellent picture, thanks.
Neat story.
Very interesting.
My grandmother said she lived in just one such place...she called it a cave with a door.
Outside, the street was cobbled and there was a church of regular construction.
Poor people lived in poor digs. Just the way it was.
I saw something like this outside of Rome when we were in Italy last year. I tried to get a pic but it went by so fast, and I wasn't willing to ask the guy to stop.
I was told told they were unoccupied, but not for how long.
Bump for antiquities.
Ping.......
Very cool, thanks for posting. I'm trying not to romanticize it in my head, although it's easy to do.
Hey, Blam, I've actually been to Matera!
Back in 1991 when I was stationed at San Vito Air Station in Italy (see my home page). We had dinner (very, very good) in a restaurant built in a cave.
Excellent. What an experience.
Beware of the do-gooders, they will have you and your family thrown out of a nice warm cave and sent to an urban slum.
Sounds like better living conditions than the Anasazis enjoyed here in North America, yet there is such a romantic view of their lifestyle as a mystical and fascinating culture.
there is a town just outside of syracusa sicily that people still live in caves. not sure what the name of the place is but it was interesting none the less
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