9:00 PMMonday, April 13, 2026
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Village for Greeks, Romans, barbarians, Saracens—a lot of examples of many peoples and populations coming, developing, fortifying, and the population growing. So, when the population is growing, you need spaces for food. To grow food for your animals, you need storage rooms. They were using the natural caves on this side as storage for food.
And as the population kept growing, especially in the eleventh and twelfth centuries after the Normans came, the city started to grow outward because they started to use the caves as quarries.
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In 1951, Henri Cartier-Bresson took a photo of this place — in via Purgatorio Vecchio in the Sassi Caves. His Leica M3 captured women and children going about daily life. Today, the place is abandoned.
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The bed, the crib for the smallest child, an extra window for extra light. And then, over there—to keep the grains inside—that piece of furniture, a table.
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Matera
People have lived in these caves for almost 10,000 years. Our guests spend two nights here, sleeping in a hotel cut into the Sassi rock, and kneading and baking the…
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Il Forno di Gennaro
A family bakery in Matera since 1890. You knead, shape, and bake your own Pane di Matera with Patrizia, Sabrina, and master baker Enzo. In the Sassi, women made five-kilo…
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