The Sassi di Matera

The Sassi of Matera are today UNESCO heritage, as well as an open-air museum that leaves without words. The other amazing thing about Matera is that the stones are overlooking the Gravina, a wild canyon where to walk in search of ancient crashed churches, caves and amazing views of Matera itself.

Let's start with the canyon and then talk about the stones.
The Gravina separates Matera from the Murgia Materana plateau, where you can park for free for an overview of the stones and to explore the canyon. An exciting characteristic of the Murgia is that it is full of caves, which once they were inhabited, and also has frescoed cave churches.

Going down into the canyon you can then go back to the other side towards Matera (the height difference is about 100 meters); For this reason, the Murgia can also be a good starting point to explore the stones, during the day, without paying parking :)

In reality, the Murgia plateau is in turn divided into two by a secondary canyon created by the Ises Torrent: Murgercas is the smallest and most close to Matera plateau, characterized by some Grosse open-air quarries. The path that descends from Murgerchia is a lot of wild. Under the Murgerchia there is the picturesque rupestrial church Madonna di Monteverde.

The Gravina canyon is rich in vegetation and if you go down from the Murger, you must try your hand at a funny look :)

From the main Murgia plateau of Matera you can reach the path that goes up to Matera with a suspension bridge that crosses the Gravina.

After this wild itinerary of approach to Matera, it's time to talk about the stones, UNESCO heritage and incredible place.
The Sasso Caveoso and the Sasso Barisano are two historic districts of Matera in which the houses were partially built inside caves dug into the rock. Their view is really exciting, with the houses piled up one on the other and in the middle churches, the bell towers and some splendid buildings.

Peasants and breeders lived in the stones for centuries, and if in some cases the structures external to the cave had a certain dignity, many others were just over caves in which numerous families coexisted, a donkey and maybe a few hen.

Following the growth of the population, as you can imagine, the hygienic conditions became scandalous. Thus, in the fifties, the population was moved to new residential buildings built to Matera, near the stones.

Today the Sassi di Matera are uninhabited, apart from day to bars, restaurants and souvenir shops. In short, it is a wonderful open-air museum. This removes a bit of authenticity to this incredible place, but at least people live in health, and today Matera is rightly a destination for tourism more and more renowned all over the world.
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