Almost everyone says «the Sassi» in the plural without knowing why there are two of them. It is not a turn of phrase: they are two distinct districts, with two orientations, two histories and two ways of sitting on the rock.
Understanding the difference changes the visit, because it decides which side to walk down and at what hour. Understanding how a cave house was built changes something more: it turns a much photographed view into a place where, until seventy years ago, fifteen thousand people lived in conditions that the Italian Parliament declared by law to be in need of clearance.
This is the part of Matera you cannot see from the viewpoint, and to see it you have to go inside a house.
Caveoso and Barisano are not the same place
What separates the two districts, if from a distance they look like the same thing? The orientation, and everything else follows from it.
The Sasso Caveoso faces south, towards the ravine and the Murgia, and steps down in tiers like the cavea of a theatre: that is where the name comes from. It is the district where rock dominates masonry, where caves stay visible as caves, and where the Monterrone spur rises with two churches carved inside it.
The Sasso Barisano faces north-west, towards Bari, and is the more built-up half. Here, in front of the caves, stone fronts, carved doorways and small palaces have grown over the centuries: the cave is still there but it sits behind, and in many cases it has turned into the back room of an ordinary house.
The practical consequence is plain and useful. The Caveoso takes the sun in the middle of the day and offers the harshest views, with the rock bare; the Barisano is more sheltered, easier to walk and is where most of the hotels and restaurants now are. If you have one morning, the Caveoso; if you are looking for shade in July, the Barisano.
How a cave house works
Inside, all these dwellings follow the same plan, and the plan is not improvised poverty: it is a system.
There is one room, cut deep into the calcarenite, as wide as necessary and as long as required. At the far end, the coolest point, stands the bed. Towards the mouth, where the light reaches, is the day area. Against one wall is the stable, because the animal was the family’s capital and slept indoors. Under the floor is the cistern, which collects rainwater from the roof through a channel.
The bed stands high off the ground, and underneath it are the drawers where the smallest children slept. A house of this kind normally held a family of ten or eleven people, together with the mule, the hens and the stores.
What almost always escapes the visitor is the vicinato. Cave houses did not open onto a street but onto a shared courtyard, with the well or the cistern at its centre: that space was the summer kitchen, the laundry, the children’s nursery and the court of law for quarrels. The social structure of the Sassi was out there, not inside the rooms, and it is the reason the move to the new districts was experienced as a loss and not only as a gain in square metres.
The cave house of Vico Solitario
The furnished cave house you can visit in the Sasso Caveoso is the Storica Casa Grotta di Vico Solitario, and it is the stop I would recommend first to anyone arriving in Matera.
The display reconstructs the house as it was in the 1950s, with the objects in their places rather than in cases: the bed, the hanging cradle, the manger, the loom, the tools. The ticket also covers a neviera, the pit where pressed snow was kept to have ice in summer, a natural cave with a documentary about the city, and the small rock church of Sant’Agostino al Casalnuovo.
If you want to make more sense of it, a guided walking tour of the Sassi includes entry to a cave house and a rock church, and saves you the work of reconstructing on your own where one vicinato ended and the next began.
The book that changed everything
How does a district lived in for centuries become, within three years, a national political case? Because of a book.
In 1945 Carlo Levi published Christ Stopped at Eboli, the account of his internal exile in Lucania. In the pages about Matera the city is described through the eyes of the author’s sister, and in an Italy that was writing its Constitution that description was read as an indictment. Levi returned to the subject all his life, and his canvases on this world hang today in Palazzo Lanfranchi, a few steps from here.
In 1948 Palmiro Togliatti visited the Sassi and publicly called them a «national disgrace». The phrase entered the debate and never left it. From that moment Matera was no longer one southern city among others: it was a problem to be solved.
The evacuation, and the new houses
The solution came with a law, and the law has a precise date: 17 May 1952, number 619, passed unanimously under the De Gasperi government and known as the legge Colombo, after the Lucanian deputy Emilio Colombo who wrote it.
The act ordered the clearance of the Sassi districts and in practice emptied them. Between 1952 and 1965 the fifteen thousand inhabitants of the Sassi, half the city, were moved into purpose-built quarters: Serra Venerdì, Lanera, Spine Bianche, Venusio for the farming families and above all the borgo La Martella.
La Martella is not just another public housing estate, and this is the part of the story worth knowing. It was born inside the UNRRA-Casas programme chaired by Adriano Olivetti, with a team of designers led by Ludovico Quaroni, and it tried to rebuild in the countryside what the Sassi had and the suburbs do not: a church at the centre, a square, shared spaces conceived like the vicinati. The attempt only partly succeeded, because a community cannot be transplanted by a zoning plan, but the idea behind it is among the most serious that Italian town planning has ever put to the test.
The immediate result, though, was a void. For about thirty years the Sassi were an uninhabited district in the middle of a living city.
The return, and 1993
How do you bring people back to a place the state made them leave by law?
The answer came with another law, that of 1986, which funded the recovery and granted the use of the buildings to whoever undertook to restore them. From there the return began, at first very slowly and then quickly: workshops, houses, and later hotels and restaurants.
In 1993 the Sassi and the Park of the Rupestrian Churches became a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the first in southern Italy to be listed. In 2019 Matera was European Capital of Culture.
It is worth holding the two dates together, 1952 and 1993, because they are the same place judged in opposite ways within a single lifetime: first to be emptied, then to be protected for the whole of humanity. It is the most interesting thing the Sassi have to say, and it is written on no information panel.
Practical information
Details checked on 6 September 2026 on the site casagrotta.it. Prices and hours change: check again before you travel.
Tickets for the Casa Grotta di Vico Solitario. The full ticket costs 5 euros and covers the cave house, the snow pit, the natural cave with its documentary and the rock church of Sant’Agostino al Casalnuovo. The reduced ticket costs 3 euros and applies to visitors over 65, to university students, to FAI members and to groups with a licensed guide. School parties and young people between 11 and 18 pay 2 euros.
Free entry. Entry is free for children up to 10, for people with disabilities, for journalists, for tour guides and for residents of Matera.
Hours. The Casa Grotta opens every day of the year, holidays included, 9.30-18.30.
Getting there. The Casa Grotta is at vico Solitario 11, in the Sasso Caveoso, about ten minutes on foot from Piazza Vittorio Veneto. You go down by stepped lanes: there is no level route.
How long it takes. The cave house with its outbuildings takes half an hour. Walking both districts properly, going into a rock church, takes a full day.
Careful: in the Sassi you walk uphill and downhill, almost never on the flat. Trainers are enough, sandals with a smooth sole are not, and in winter the worn steps are slippery.
When to go. In summer the surface of the steps throws the heat back and in the middle of the day the Caveoso is punishing. The shoulder seasons are by far the best time.
Where to look at them from
The vantage point that explains the Sassi better than any other is not inside the Sassi: it is on the far side of the ravine, from the Murgia Timone viewpoint, where you see the whole city set into the canyon. You get there by car, or on foot along the trail that drops into the gorge.
From inside, the two finest outlooks remain the one on Piazza Vittorio Veneto, with the cathedral opposite, and the one at the end of via del Corso, above the Sasso Caveoso.
For the rest of the city, my guide on what to see in Matera lines up the main stops. The churches carved inside these two districts are in the article on the rock churches and the Murgia park, and the cistern that supplied the whole quarter is in the article on the Palombaro Lungo.
Photographs: the Sassi from the Murgia Timone viewpoint and from the bottom of the ravine by Benjamin Smith, the cave house interiors by Superchilum (CC BY-SA 4.0), from Wikimedia Commons.
