The story
As you begin your walk down Via Bruno Buozzi, you are stepping into the heart of a story that spans millennia, yet its most dramatic chapter unfolded only seventy years ago. This wide, winding road serves as the main artery of the Sasso Caveoso, the southern district of Matera’s ancient cave city. Look around at the pale, honey-colored limestone, known as calcarenite.
To your left and right, the dwellings aren’t just built onto the hillside; they are carved directly into it. For centuries, this was a masterpiece of human adaptation, but by the mid-twentieth century, it became the site of a national scandal. Pause for a moment and look up toward the massive rock monolith of Monterrone, where the churches of Madonna de Idris and San Giovanni in Monterrone are tucked into the stone.
Below them, the caves you see were once teeming with life—and unimaginable hardship. In the late 1940s, the writer Carlo Levi described the conditions here as "Dante-esque." Families of ten or twelve lived in single, damp rooms alongside their mules and chickens.
There was no running water, no sewage system, and infant mortality rates were staggering. When the politician Palmiro Togliatti visited, he branded Matera the "shame of Italy." This declaration led to the 1952 Special Law.
The government ordered the forced evacuation of fifteen thousand people from these caves. Imagine the scene on this very street: families who had lived here for generations being loaded into trucks, leaving behind the only homes they knew for modern, concrete housing projects on the outskirts of town. For decades after, the Sasso Caveoso fell silent.
The doors were walled up, and the area became a ghost town, a crumbling reminder of poverty that the country wanted to forget. As you continue down Via Bruno Buozzi toward the Piazza San Pietro Caveoso, notice the small doorways of the "Case Grotta" museums. These preserved dwellings show exactly how life was lived before the exodus.
You can almost hear the echoes of children playing and the clatter of hooves on the stone. But the story doesn’t end in tragedy. In a remarkable twist of history, the very place once labeled a national embarrassment was named a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1993 and the European Capital of Culture in 2019.
Today, those same caves have been transformed into boutique hotels and galleries. As you walk, consider the resilience of Matera. The stone remains the same, but the spirit of the place has shifted from a symbol of neglect to a beacon of cultural rebirth.
The "shame" has been replaced by a deep, quiet pride that resonates in every step you take on these ancient stones.