The Sassi of Matera, now a beautiful place to visit, but as I mentioned in yesterday’s post, it was once known as ‘the shame of Italy,’ after Italian painter, writer, activist, communist and doctor Carlo Levi describes the situation of the Sassi in his book Cristo si è fermato a Eboli (Christ Stopped at Eboli) published in 1945.

This is what Carlo Levi wrote about Matera:

“Inside those black caves that had walls made of soil, I could see the beds, the poor furnishings, the clothes hanging.

Dogs, sheep, goats, and pigs were lying down on the floor.

Typically, every family owns just one of those caves as a house, and they sleep all together: men, women, children, animals. There was an infinite number of children, some of them were naked, others were dressed in rags. I saw some children sitting in the baking sun, on the doorsteps of their houses, into the dirt, their eyes were half-closed and their eyelids red and swollen. This was due to trachoma. I knew that here people suffered from it: but seeing its effects in filth and in extreme poverty it is a different thing. Flies roosted in their eyes and it seemed that they did not feel it on their little, wrinkled faces, like those of old people, emaciated by the famine: their hair were full of lice. Skinny women gave their shrivelled breasts to malnourished and dirty children, it seemed to be in a city stricken by the plague.”

To think what this author described was in the 1940s which means that what we see now has required years of time, energy and expenses to create. And, yet in the process, the people of Matera lost their homes, their history and their place in their historic homeland when the government stepped in to ‘save’ the people from the unsanitary conditions, the horrible health issues and a way of life that was utterly dehumanizing.

But here’s to the history and more views of Matera.