Matera’s Sassi occupy the sides of a deep ravine cut into the limestone plateau of Basilicata. Natural caves offered shelter from prehistoric times, but the visible settlement is the product of repeated excavation and construction across many centuries. Residents cut rooms into rock, built façades outward with quarried blocks, and stacked paths, roofs, cisterns, gardens, animal spaces, workshops, churches, and houses in a closely connected system. The Sasso Caveoso and Sasso Barisano developed below the higher Civita, the city’s early fortified nucleus.

From the early medieval period, religious communities enlarged caves as chapels, monasteries, and hermitages across the town and the Murgia plateau. Byzantine, Lombard, Norman, and Latin Christian traditions all left traces in rock-cut churches and painted interiors. A Romanesque cathedral was erected on the Civita in the thirteenth century. Later neighborhoods and palaces expanded above the Sassi, while the cave districts remained home to laborers, artisans, and animals. Ingenious channels and underground cisterns captured scarce rainwater and made dense occupation possible.

Matera’s social conditions deteriorated sharply as population increased and rural poverty deepened in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many families lived in crowded rooms with poor ventilation, limited sanitation, and livestock. Carlo Levi’s writing helped make the Sassi a national symbol of southern deprivation, though outside descriptions sometimes treated residents as relics rather than modern citizens. In the 1950s the Italian state relocated most inhabitants to new housing. Evacuation improved public health for many families but disrupted established communities and left buildings vulnerable to abandonment and decay.

Recognition shifted during the later twentieth century. Conservation laws and local activism promoted rehabilitation, and residents, businesses, cultural institutions, hotels, and restaurants returned from the 1980s onward. UNESCO inscribed the Sassi and the Park of the Rupestrian Churches in 1993. Matera’s selection as a European Capital of Culture for 2019 accelerated investment and tourism. Adaptive reuse has saved structures, yet commercialization, rising property values, visitor pressure, and the loss of permanent residents threaten to turn a complex urban habitat into a scenic accommodation district.

The Sassi should not be described simply as ancient caves continuously occupied without change. Excavated chambers were enlarged, enclosed, divided, abandoned, restored, and connected to modern services. Some interiors preserve early fabric, while others are extensive reconstructions. The site’s importance lies in long-term adaptation to geology, water, agriculture, worship, poverty, public policy, and changing ideas of heritage. Its difficult twentieth-century history is as essential as its picturesque appearance. Preservation succeeds when it protects rock-cut architecture, plateau landscape, water systems, sacred art, and a viable resident community together.