Every household here had a stamp, and the stamp had their initials cut into it, and you pressed it into the dough before you carried it out of your door.
Not decoration. The oven was not yours.
Nobody down in these caves had an oven, so the bread was mixed at home and carried up the lane to a communal one, and the baker kept a book of whose turn fell on which day. Thirty loaves go in. Thirty come out. Yours is the one with your father’s initials burned into the crust.
The practical Matera, the tickets and the timings and where to eat, is in my complete guide to Matera. This is a day out of the town.
The bread is still made. Durum semolina, a crust you could knock on, a yellow crumb full of holes, and a shape with three points that people will tell you is the hills of the Murgia and which I am not going to argue with. It keeps for a week. That is not a boast about quality, it is the whole design. You baked once and then you ate it for seven days, and by day five you were putting it in water or in soup, which is where half the cooking in this region comes from.
I bought a quarter of a loaf at eight in the morning and ate it standing up.
The stamps themselves are in the museum, dozens of them in one case, and I went back to that case twice.
They were carved by shepherds. That is the detail that got me. Men out on the Murgia for weeks with the animals and nothing to do in the long parts of the day, so they cut a handle and a base and the letters of a household they were not going to see for a while.
What survives of most people is very little, and here it is two letters on a piece of wood, cut by somebody else, to solve a problem about bread.
What I have of my father is not scenes. It is his voice in another room. His boots in a hallway. Being carried, and the particular safety of it. I have spent a long time treating that as a thing I lost, as though there were a fuller version somewhere that I failed to hold on to.
Standing at that case I was less sure. Two letters was what a whole household got, and nobody thought that was nothing.
There is a house you can go into, one room, set up the way it was.
A bed high off the floor, because underneath it is where the mule slept. A loom against one wall. A cistern cut into the rock to catch what came off the roof, because there is no water in this town, none, it has no river and it never had one, which is why the whole place is built around collecting and hoarding rain. Ten or twelve people in the room, and the animals, and the loom going.
The mule is not a detail people expect. It was the household’s engine and it was worth more than most of what was in there, so of course it slept inside.
I have read the sentence about how they lived and I have been irritated by the tone of it before. Standing in the room, the thing I actually felt was how organised it was. Nothing in there was accidental. Every surface was doing a job.
At about eleven I walked out of the town, which is the thing I would tell anyone to do.
The path goes down. Down past the last of the houses, down past where the paving gives up, down into the gorge on a track of loose white stone with nothing over it, no tree, no shade, nothing, and the heat comes up off the rock at you as well as down.
At the bottom there is water, which after two days of a town with no water in it is a genuinely strange thing to arrive at. And a footbridge, wood and cable, that moves under you the way they all do.
Then it goes up. Forty minutes up, and I was not fast.
On the far side is the Murgia, which is where people lived first. Before the town on the other bank, before any of the churches, before the walls. There are caves over there too, and rock churches with frescoes worn down to the colour of the stone, and they are older and emptier and almost nobody walks to them.
I sat on the rim for a long time and looked back.
From over there the town is not picturesque. It is legible. You can see exactly what it is: a wall of rooms in a cliff, stacked and stepped, each with a door and no window, and lanes running along the tops of the roofs below because the roof of one house is the street of the next. You cannot see that from inside it. Inside it you see corners and steps and washing.
From a kilometre away, across a gorge, with the whole face of it in the sun, you can see the logic. It is not a town that was placed on a hill. It is a hill that people cut rooms into, for nine thousand years, until it was a town.
I could see the terrace of the place I am sleeping in. Small pale square. Fourth row up.
The walk back took longer than the walk out and I ran out of water, which I want to record accurately because everything up to this point has been rather elevated and the last hour was mostly me being annoyed about the sun.
I got back into the lanes at about five, into that hour when nothing is open yet and the stone has begun handing back the heat it took all day.
Bought bread again on the way in. The same shape. Nobody’s initials on it now.
V.
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