The Sassi are not a neighbourhood. They are the town, and the word simply means stones.
Most people arrive with a picture in their head of a hillside of pale houses and leave with something considerably stranger, because the houses are not on the hillside. They are in it. Every one of them starts as a room cut back into soft limestone and grows outward, so what you are looking at from across the ravine is a cliff that has been hollowed for nine thousand years and then given facades.
This guide is about the district itself: how it is built, why it looks like that, what happened to it in the twentieth century and who lives there now. The practical trip planning sits in my complete guide to Matera.
A town built on its own roof
There are two Sassi and a ridge between them.
Sasso Barisano faces roughly north and is the restored half. It has the hotels, the restaurants, the smoother paving and the handsome evening light, and it is where most people stay.
Sasso Caveoso faces south, is steeper and rougher, and is much closer to what the place actually was. Cave mouths stand open in the rock. It is the half that will unsettle you, and it is the half worth walking slowly.
Between them rises the Civita, the spur of rock with the cathedral on top, which is the oldest inhabited part and the one with the best views down into both.
Now the thing that takes half a day to properly see. There is no ground level here. The roof of one house is the terrace, and often the street, of the house above it. A lane you are walking along is somebody’s ceiling. The steps at the end of it drop you onto another roof, which is another lane.
This is why the map is useless in the ordinary way. Two points thirty metres apart vertically can be a ten minute walk, because you have to go along until you find the staircase that connects the tiers. Nothing about it is inconvenient once you stop fighting it. It is simply a town organised in a dimension you are not used to.
The water underneath
Nobody settles a dry limestone plateau without solving water first, and the water system here is the piece of Matera that impresses me most.
Rain that fell on the roofs and lanes was caught, channelled and moved downhill through the town, house to house. Almost every dwelling had a small cistern cut into its own floor. Beneath the main square sits the communal one: a chamber fifteen metres deep, carved out of the rock, its walls rendered in waterproof plaster, its roof vaulted.
It supplied the town for centuries and was then forgotten so completely that the square above became a car park. It was rediscovered and opened properly only in recent decades, and you can now walk down into it for about three euros in a small group, on limited slots. You cannot book it online, so buy at the entrance and go early in the day rather than late.
Stand at the bottom and look up at the single shaft of daylight. The town stops being picturesque and starts being engineering.
What happened in the 1950s
This is the part I would not skip, and a lot of guides do.
By the mid twentieth century the Sassi held conditions that had become a national embarrassment: families of eight or ten in a single windowless room, the mule living in the same room, malaria, and infant mortality at levels that made headlines when a writer exiled here under the Fascists described what he had found.
In 1952 a law was passed and the Sassi were cleared. Around fifteen thousand people were moved out to new housing built on the plateau above, and the caves were sealed. For roughly three decades the district stood empty, a hollow town below a modern one.
What brought it back was a slow reversal of opinion: that the caves were not slums by nature but slums by neglect, and that with water, drainage and light they were extraordinary places to live. Repopulation began in the 1980s. UNESCO listed the Sassi and the rock churches in 1993. In 2019 Matera was European Capital of Culture.
That arc, from condemned to celebrated inside one lifetime, is the thing to carry around with you while you walk.
Who lives here now
Around three thousand people, in a district built for many times that.
The honest picture is mixed. A good share of the restored caves are hotels, holiday lets and restaurants, and there are stretches of the Barisano side where you can walk for ten minutes and pass nobody who lives there. But turn into Caveoso in the early evening and it is a town: chairs in doorways, washing on lines strung between rock faces, somebody calling a child’s name from two tiers up.
There are also, still, unrestored caves. Doors bricked up, or open onto nothing. You will pass them without noticing unless you look, and once you have noticed one you will see them everywhere.
The most interesting thing about the Sassi is that it is not a museum and not a normal town. It is a place mid-way through being reinhabited, and you are visiting during the process rather than after it.
Seeing it properly
Three things make the difference between walking through and understanding it.
Go into a furnished cave house early in your stay. The best known one costs eight euros, which is a combined ticket covering a snow store, a natural grotto and a rock-cut church as well, it takes fifteen minutes, and every lane afterwards reads differently.
Walk Caveoso in the first hour of daylight, when the shutters are still down and the shadows are long, and again after six, when people come out.
And get to the far rim of the ravine at least once, because the Sassi are the only town I know that cannot be seen from inside itself. The whole shape only exists from the other side of the gorge.
Read also: the best things to do in Matera, the Belvedere and the Murgia park, and my complete guide to Matera.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does Sassi mean?
It is simply the Italian for stones. It refers to the two districts of cave dwellings, Sasso Barisano and Sasso Caveoso, that make up the old town of Matera, along with the Civita ridge between them.
Are the Sassi free to visit?
Yes. Walking the districts is free, with no ticket, gate or closing time. You pay only for individual sites within them, such as a furnished cave house at eight euros on a combined ticket, the underground cistern at about three, or a rock-cut church at two to four.
Do people still live in the Sassi?
Yes, around three thousand. The district was cleared by law in the 1950s and stood largely empty for three decades, then repopulated from the 1980s onward. Today it is a mix of residents, hotels and holiday lets, with some caves still unrestored.
Why were the Sassi evacuated?
Because conditions had become a national scandal: severe overcrowding in single windowless rooms shared with livestock, malaria and very high infant mortality. A law in 1952 rehoused around fifteen thousand people on the plateau above, and the caves were sealed.
Which Sasso should you stay in?
Barisano is more restored and more comfortable, with most of the hotels and restaurants. Caveoso is rougher, steeper and closer to the original character. If it is your first visit and stairs concern you, Barisano or the upper streets are the easier choice.
