Matera: A Southern Italian Town Revives Its Ancient Cave Dwellings (9,000-Years-Old)

Mercury News ^ | 7-17-2006 | Carol Pucci

[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.

[Ptarmigan]

Interesting find! I wonder who lived there. My guess is either a Basque-like or Celts.

[SunkenCiv]

;')

[SunkenCiv]

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