Is Anybody In There ?

Caveman`s dwellings can be explored in the ravines of Southern Italy. Since ye olde times nomad sheperds have lived in these caverns out of necessity. Now only sheep, goats and the bourgeoisie can live in there.

'Bedrock' - The Flintstones` village - is what came to mind while walking the cavern villages dug in the rock of the Apulian ravines. Southern Italy towns such as Matera, Ginosa and Gravina are grown from Stone-Age-cavern villages and Iron Age huts. They are ideal goals for trips in the time, back to cavemen`s times.

"Our history is not written in books, but it`s written in nature" says Piero Di Canio of Legambiente - an Italian green association. "Our history is written in the Gravina. These caverns and rock-chapels tell us about our origins. Wandering in the Gravina you can read the story of the peoples that have lived on these rocks. Our ancestors have dug their dens like the foxes or moles that now live the caves."

In the rock-shelters of these ravines called 'Gravine', Dr. Domenico Ridola - founder of the Matera`s National Museum - descovered decorated pottery, stone tools, sarcophaguses with historiated crockery, necklaces, coins, statues, arrowheads and tips of lances of circa 650-550,000 years ago.

During the period of the Punic Wars, Matera sheltered the fugitives from Metapontum and Heraclea. Thus its name may derive from the combination of the first three letters of the names of these villages (Met-Era). Other scholars claim that it could also derive from 'Mata', which means 'Heaps of rocks'.

Remains of the Greater Greece are still visible in Metaponto - ten minutes by car from Matera. The 'Tavole Palatine' of Metapontum was the place where Pythagoras used to teach (6 C. B.C). Later it was transformed into the Temple of Hera, of which the 15 colunns are still visible.

Between the 8 and 13 C., groups of monks persecuted by the iconoclastic controversy initiated by the Byzantine Emperor Leo III, found the ancient cave-dwellings as an ideal refuge. Monasteries and rock-hewn churches were built complete of icons, pulpits, sanctuaries, altars and frescos. They reproduced the original pattern of those existing in their own countries.

Most of Matera`s churches are carved into the rock integrating with the outside facades in the style in vogue at the time of construction - medieval, classical or baroque.

When the persecution stopped (15C) the monks moved elsewhere and the peasants took over completely the ancient quarters for themselves and their animals. They were able to capture the water in underground tanks, keeping winter snow and ice to create real cold stores. Building terraces for farming and walled vegetable plots. Caves, trenches, enclosures, water collecting basins, underground architecture, evolved in vast complexes for human habitation. Thus two districs were formed - the Sasso Caveoso and the Sasso Barisano. In the centre was the fortified acropolis, the old refuge in case of danger on the site of which the Cathedral was built.

Matera was made famous by the Italian novelist Carlo Levi in his book 'Cristo si e` fermato a Eboli' (Christ stopped at Eboli) and by numerous film directors including Pier Paolo Pasolini, who chose this city as the location for his film 'The Gospel according to Matthew'. In 1993 Matera was the first town in South Italy to be included in the Unesco World Heritage list.

The town great attraction is the old centre known as the Sassi (stones) - a primitive residential system in the deep valley of Matera`s Gravina. The Sassi is structured over several levels with terraces all the way to the bottom, in a sophisticated system for collecting water. From the top it looks like a spiral made of roads and small alleys through caves, houses and underground labyrinths. Every house is the roof and the base of an other.

People has dug the nutural grottos to build more rooms. The first room from the main entrance was the living room - which could be in the same cavern that served as bed-room. On the rear wall is a niche cut in such a way as to catch the rays of the sun. A few steps down a stone manger deliniated a room for the animals. The lowest rooms were caverns used as cellars for food and wine.

A 80 something man who has lived in a cave for more than 20 years, explained that - "with this house organization if someone wanted to steal the animals, the only treasure of those times, they had to pass through the bedroom - the only way-out from the cowshed or pen. And it is hard to herd three noisy goats past their sleeping owner."

In these 30 hectares of territory lived some 20,000 people - paesants, land-owners, shepherds, craftsmen, merchants and labourers. In 1952-53 the destruction of the water collection network, overpopulation and the resulting decline in hygiene, forced the Italian Government to declare Matera a 'national disgrace'. Its inhabitants were transfered to new districts - some of them emigrated. The Sassi di Matera thus held a new record - the largest completely abandoned historical centre. The Italian writer Carlo Levi standed - "Matera is the form which at school I imagined for Dante`s 'Inferno'."

The Sassi still appear like a heap of empty shells. Last time I went there I wandered through labyrinthhs of unoccupied caves. A no man`s town. In the middle of the main road, down in the valley of the Sasso Barisano I saw a few restored houses. I found the shop-studio of Eustacchio Rizzi - a local artist.

He has worked tufo rocks (limestone) to build a huge miniature of the old town, which I found useful to plan my tour in the Sassi. "The middle-class is restoring some of these empty houses," he said. "It`s now trendy to live here. But only the rich can afford to restore these caverns and make them habitable. They lack of good plumbing and heating systems."

Mr. Vincenzo Santilio from the 'Azienda di Promozione Turistica Regionale' told me that - "from the touristic point of view, Matera has been more lucky than other small towns in the area. First because Matera is a city. Second because Matera`s polititians have been more sensitive of the cultural heritage of the Sassi, than have Ginosa`s, for example, where you can find a peculiar Saracen village completely ignored."

"This is an ancient land with much still to be discovered and there will doubtless be as many surprises in the future as in the past. It deserves to be visited for the relationship with the stone. We all derive from cavemen. Men changed and die, stones are still there." And after offering me several maps of the town he added - "tell everybody in England that Italy is not just Florence, Rome, Venice and Riccione."

Perhaps the best way of visiting the Sassi is with the sympathetic guidance of one of the many small boys who know everything and take you to the most unthought of places. This occupation has been transmitted from fathers to sons, who now speak 3 foreign languages and carry mobile phones.

"The tourist information offices of the town provide good guides," said Raffaele Stifano, a young guy who had a cave in the Sasso Caveoso, where he let the tourists use his toilet. "But if you want I can find a couple of friends who can guide you anywhere. It will cost you less."

His cave was the only place in the Sasso Caveoso open at midday where I could find something to eat. He offers drinks, crisps and typical souvenirs from Matera. "I`m jobless, the local council doesn`t want to give me the permit to open a cafe, so in order to survive I have to offer to get some help from tourists." For 10,000 Lire (£ 3.50), he prepared a huge panino with local delicatessen and we shared a half a bottle of Amaro.

I took a coach to Ginosa - a small town in the Apulian Murgia Plateau. The urban changes of Ginosa are well visible from the plateau soon outside the town. The new town covers an old Mediterranean medieval village around a castle which dominates a valley-chanel of caverns. The population has moved from the ravines up to stonebuilt houses, leaving the caves for the flocks and the poorest.

Semi-nomadic groups of farmers and shephers were the first inhabitants of the caves. Later on they housed the refuges of the Roman invasion. Today sheperds still graze their flocks in the Ginosa`s Gravina, as their ancestors did. But they don`t live in the gorge any longer. Their flocks do - grottos are perfect places for goats, sheep and lambs to repair against cold and rain.

With an inhabitant`s directions I went to explore the caves. Most of them were abandoned. They were littered with any sort of rubbish - from car tyres to Vespa frames. The only furniture in the caverns was a stone dug in the wall used to grind wheat or barley to make the flour for cave-made bread or pasta.

The irregular walls and the high ceilings were mostly covered by a green mould. Looking down at the stone pavement, grass and bushes growth here and there as if mother-nature was slowly retaken possession of what once belonged to her.

The living rooms were recognizable by the dark fire place in a corner. No other source of light except the main entrance. At the back, the places for the animals still had the metal rings on the walls to tie cattles, donkeys or impatient goats.

Stone basins of different dimension, some like bath-tub others like small pools, occupied what once were the family`s wine cellar. Whole barefoot families during the grape-harvest time, climbed inside the basins full of grapes to make wine and have fun at the same time.

Ginosa`s Gravina, as Matera`s, is also renowned for its rock-hewn churches with their fine wall decorations. I went to climb the gorge in search of frescos. It was terrific to wander and absorb this mystic and surreal landscape, the calm and solitude it offered. I found the rock-church of St. Barbara - five adjacent and interconnecting caverns decorated with Byzantine frescoes of the 10th and 11th centuries.

A beautiful Christ on an altar built in the rock and the Saint Sofia painted on the front wall of the cavern make the rock-chapel of St. Sofia unique. Surrounded by bushes, olive trees and wild spring-flowers, it looks more like a pagan temple than a Christian church. It is hard to imagine crowds of people attending the Mass in a such hidden place.

Bands of brigands faithful to the 'Borbonici' and anemies of the Italian Kingdom have found safe shelters in this plateau. They also used the caves in the ravines to hide their loot as some criminals may still do nowdays with contrabbanded drugs and cigarettes. It is said that Secret caverns may still hide the treasures sacked by the Templars, the Knight of the Holy Temple, in their return from the Holy Land.

Playing Indiana Jones I didn`t found any treasure, but a cavern full of human bones under the 'Chiesa Madre' - one of the oldest stonebuilt church of the town. A heap of skulls and bones were amassed like in the scenes of the Holocaust, or the Pol-Pot`s massacres. Since Ginosa`s cemetery was built in 1842, and the Chiesa Madre church go back to the 15 C., those were the bones of 20-generation ancestors.

One of the reasons of my trip was to watch a play. Each year on Holy Wednesday and Saturday (replica on the 8th of August), the local tourist association 'Ginosa Pro Loco' organises a 'Passio Christi' using 300 townspeople for actors and the olive trees, the prickly pears and the caverns of the Gravina as stage.

The whole looked like Bethlehem or Jerusalem 2,000 years ago. Light, music and narrative mixed eloquently with the starry sky, evoking great emotions to the audience. The drama reaches frenzied peaks when Judas hung himself and at the Crucifixion of Christ. It was so realistic that, with a lump in my throat, I couldn`t stop clapping. Although I knew the story.

With a couple of dinosaurs on the valley, I think this set would be perfect for 'The Flinstones' as well.

Felice Petrelli

10.7.98 copyright felixpetrelli