Today, it’s one of the most astonishing places in Italy – a city carved into a rugged hillside – but just a few years ago, Matera was branded a national disgrace. Many residents still remember when ...

Five years ago I spent a three days in the Basilicata town called of Matera, called “la città sotterranea” ("the underground city"), a slightly eerie place where many of hillside cave dwellings dating ...

UNESCO has repeatedly used Matera, designated a World Heritage Site in 1996, as an educational case study for sustainable living In the provinces of southeastern Italy, the landscape is changing, as a ...

Some places feel modern and fast-moving, while others seem frozen in time. Matera belongs to the second kind. Located in southern Italy, this extraordinary city is one of the oldest continuously ...

Time should tick slowly in a city like Matera. Claimed as the third-oldest continually inhabited settlement in the world (after Aleppo and Jericho), the southern Italian city has been home to someone ...

Fifty years after Italy's Matera was a national embarrassment because of its extreme poverty, the city is rescuing its dignity, baroque palaces and cave churches to become a European Capital of ...

There is a sense of shame as Luigi Plasmati, 89, recollects growing up amid chronic poverty in a crammed cave in Matera, an ancient, bruised city in Italy’s southern Basilicata region. “It was brutal, ...

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