Fourteen kilometres from Matera, inside a cave in the middle of the vineyards, there is a ninth-century fresco cycle, and you cannot see it without booking.
That is not a rule invented for effect. The Crypt of the Original Sin is a natural cavity with a fragile microclimate: it is visited in counted, accompanied groups, at fixed times, and anyone who turns up at the gate without a booking is turned away.
For those who plan ahead, inside there is one of the best-preserved early medieval paintings in southern Italy, and an iconographic detail that turns the familiar story on its head.
What if the fruit of original sin, here, were not an apple?
Where it is, and why nobody arrives here by chance
The crypt is not in the Sassi and it is not in the Murgia park. It stands in contrada Pietrapenta, along the ancient Via Appia, about fourteen kilometres south of the city, in the wall of a side ravine and in the middle of a farm.
Why has an eighth-century cycle come down to us here, and not in one of the churches inside the city? Because for eleven centuries hardly anyone came through this ravine. The remoteness that today obliges you to take a car, or a service that brings you there and back, is the same that spared the crypt its Baroque remodelling, its new plaster and the wear of daily use.
The appointment is at the ticket office, and the ticket office is inside the farm. From there the cave is reached with a short walk between the rows of vines, which is the part of the trip where you grasp what kind of place this was.
1 May 1963, and who found it
Who brought a painting cycle of this importance back to light? Not a heritage authority and not an excavation campaign: a group of young men from Matera.
On 1 May 1963 the members of the Circolo La Scaletta, a local cultural association founded a few years earlier to survey the rupestrian heritage, walked into the cave the shepherds used as a fold and found themselves in front of painted walls. Locally the cavity was known as the Grotta dei Cento Santi, the cave of the hundred saints, the name people had given it looking at the figures without knowing what they were, and it already appears in the notes of Domenico Ridola, the Matera archaeologist of the late nineteenth century.
What followed took time. The report went to the Zétema Foundation, which from 2001, with the Central Institute for Restoration, began the conservation of the paintings and the securing of the cave. The crypt opened to the public in 2005: forty-two years passed between the discovery and the first visit.
The cycle: Genesis, and an apple that is a fig
The story that gives the crypt its name runs along the end wall, and it reads best in the order in which it was painted.
It begins with the creation of light and darkness, moves to the creation of Adam and then of Eve, and arrives at the scene of the fall. Above, in a band, run further episodes from the Old and New Testaments.
The detail that makes this wall different from almost every other is in the temptation: Eve holds out a fig to Adam, not an apple. This is not a painter’s mistake and not a local whim. The text of Genesis names no fruit; the apple enters western iconography later through a Latin pun between malum «evil» and malum «apple», and in the eighth century, in the Mediterranean, the tree of knowledge is painted as you see it here: a fig tree. This wall preserves the version that came before the tradition we all carry in our heads.
The triads, the archangels and the Virgin Queen
The side wall is organised into three niches, and each holds a group of three figures. The scheme is called a triad, and it exists to state a celestial hierarchy.
The first triad is that of the apostles Peter, Andrew and John. The second is known as the Virgin Queens: the Madonna enthroned with the Child at the centre, two female figures at her sides, all of them dressed and crowned as sovereigns rather than as mothers. The third gathers the three archangels, Michael, Gabriel and Raphael, the only ones tradition names.
The image of the enthroned Virgin is the easiest to date by eye. A Madonna Queen belongs to a moment when the cult of Mary is still expressed in the language of the imperial court, and not in the language of domestic affection that will arrive centuries later: it is the same figurative world you find in Matera, much later and already changed, in the Madonna del Latte of Santa Lucia alle Malve.
The Painter of the Flowers of Matera
We do not know the artist’s name, and scholars have given him the one you can see on the walls.
At the feet of the figures, and in the spaces between one scene and the next, runs a flowering of red five-petalled flowers, identified as cistus, the Mediterranean scrub plant that covers the Murgia in spring. They are painted with a freedom that sits oddly with the solemnity of the sacred figures, and for that reason the author has come down to us as the Painter of the Flowers of Matera.
His formation can be read in the way he treats the drapery and the faces: the paintings are traced back to the Benedictine-Beneventan milieu, the Lombard south between the eighth and ninth centuries, the same season that produces the Beneventan script and the illumination of Montecassino. The crypt was the place of worship of a Benedictine rupestrian community, and the consistency between who lived here and who painted is complete.
The label «Sistine Chapel of rupestrian painting» now goes everywhere with the monument’s name, and no source says who coined it. Like every advertising formula it should be taken for what it is: it promises Michelangelo and delivers something entirely different, an anonymous painter who in the early Middle Ages painted wild flowers around archangels.
Practical information
Details checked on 6 September 2026 on the official site criptadelpeccatooriginale.it and cross-checked with the records of isassidimatera.com and basilicatanet. Prices and hours change: check again before you travel.
Careful: the hours you read on the aggregator sites are not the right ones. Several sites give the crypt as open Tuesday to Sunday with two continuous bands: the official site gives the slots above and says it opens every day. The official source wins.
If you have an afternoon
This is not a visit to squeeze in between two others. The slot is fixed, the road is a country road and the return is not immediate: the Crypt of Original Sin needs an afternoon of its own, and it repays one.
If you are planning the rest of the trip, the whole picture is in my guide on what to see in Matera, the carved churches you can visit inside the city are in the article on the rock churches and the Murgia park, and the thirteenth-century painting that stayed in place in Matera is in the cathedral.
Photographs: the frescoes and the entrance of the crypt by Pietro & Silvia (CC BY 2.0), from Wikimedia Commons.
