Matera Countrymen Capital

Abstract

In the 1950s, Italy recovered from the trauma of the Second World War. However, in the deep South of the country, a city remained alien to this progress. Indeed, isolated for a long time, it was unable to challenge new immigration movements and ended up exceeding its saturation limit. That town was Matera, the ‘Shame of Italy’. In a country projected towards the new millennium, it was unacceptable that almost 20.000 people were living together with animals in dirty and cramped caves. Matera seemed to blame the national political class for not having taken steps to eradicate this age-old misery. The city had to be decongested, so to move part of its population and allow the caves to regain the human scale they always had. However, it did generalize: all the caves had to be cleared and the delicate countrymen life had to be transferred to a galaxy of model rural villages. In the end, few of these were made, none properly. Those same people who lived in poverty were moved to modern dormitory districts, which yet had all the comforts allowed by modern times, but which were not suitable to hosting a community shaped by consolidated urban and interpersonal relationships. Only in the 1990s, it was realized that that life, those people, could not survive outside of those same narrow caves. The human and the architectural and natural components were inseparable. They did begin to realize what should have been done long before: restoring the architectural value of the caves, which today is even beginning to attract mass tourism.