Matera
or The Cliché Shot seen on postcards!
Set: Italy - Matera, Basilicata - the view on so many postcards, or what the tourists were looking at (me included, lol).
Imagine driving through countryside that is so wide open - from horizon to horizon - so desolate, so far away from anything urban that it feels like the kind of country where a man could hide away for months … and suddenly coming across a town of cave dwellings and churches, all seemingly carved from the rock on which they stand, clinging hugger-mugger to the side of an arid, narrow ravine; that is the ancient, Biblical-seeming town of Matera, located in the southern Italian province of Basilicata.
Despite it's remoteness and the up-hill-down-dale-ness of it all there were tourists - of course!
Matera was referred to by the sister of the famed Italian writer Carlo Levi (who was sent into exile to even more remote parts of Basilicata by Mussolini's governement) as something from Dante's "Inferno" as recently as the 1930's, because of the heart-breaking squalor and poverty she encountered there. Malaria were so rife that people begged for quinine not money as they'd pretty much given up on the latter ever being an option for them at the time.
Today Matera may still be in one of the poorer and more remote regions of Italy, but it is wealthy in comparison to 80 years ago and is now an UNESCO World Heritage site, rightly so. Nevertheless, much of it remains so ancient and unspoilt a location that it was used by Mel Gibson as the location for his film "The Passion" just over 10 years ago.
Definitely worth a detour if you find yourself no more than a 2hr drive away from Matera, in our opinion.
Matera
or The Cliché Shot seen on postcards!
Set: Italy - Matera, Basilicata - the view on so many postcards, or what the tourists were looking at (me included, lol).
Imagine driving through countryside that is so wide open - from horizon to horizon - so desolate, so far away from anything urban that it feels like the kind of country where a man could hide away for months … and suddenly coming across a town of cave dwellings and churches, all seemingly carved from the rock on which they stand, clinging hugger-mugger to the side of an arid, narrow ravine; that is the ancient, Biblical-seeming town of Matera, located in the southern Italian province of Basilicata.
Despite it's remoteness and the up-hill-down-dale-ness of it all there were tourists - of course!
Matera was referred to by the sister of the famed Italian writer Carlo Levi (who was sent into exile to even more remote parts of Basilicata by Mussolini's governement) as something from Dante's "Inferno" as recently as the 1930's, because of the heart-breaking squalor and poverty she encountered there. Malaria were so rife that people begged for quinine not money as they'd pretty much given up on the latter ever being an option for them at the time.
Today Matera may still be in one of the poorer and more remote regions of Italy, but it is wealthy in comparison to 80 years ago and is now an UNESCO World Heritage site, rightly so. Nevertheless, much of it remains so ancient and unspoilt a location that it was used by Mel Gibson as the location for his film "The Passion" just over 10 years ago.
Definitely worth a detour if you find yourself no more than a 2hr drive away from Matera, in our opinion.