Ancient Abodes in Apulia

 For five days in February, I participated in a Road Scholar tour of Puglia, as we spell the Italian region of Apulia in English.  Apulia is long and narrow, the heel of Italy’s boot, the land between the Ionian and Adriatic Seas.  We explored only the southern portions of the region and dipped into neighboring Basilicata one day.  There is much to see and enjoy in Apulia—beaches, low mountains, beautiful cities, and historic sites.  I have described these is other posts.

Archaeologists have uncovered evidence of Messapi peoples who lived in southern Puglia eight or more centuries BC and before either the Greeks or Romans began to build their cities and walls.  Many cities in Italy, and indeed Europe, have uncovered or preserved Roman-built structures. 

Another ancient people settled in the mountain caves in what is now the city of Matera.  These rock cities, or sassi, are the only continuously inhabited dwellings dating back for at least nine thousand years.

The caves provided the initial shelters, but over the millennia, they have been modified, expanded, rebuilt, and remodeled many times.  The soft limestone allowed dwellers to dig back into the mountainside to expand their caves.  There are actually two mountainsides covered with dwellings.  A ravine with a river running through it separated the two sides.  But over thousands of years, as the cities expanded, much of the valley was filled in.  Without clean water, the sassi became breeding grounds for disease.

In 1947, Carlo Levi, published Christ Stopped at Eboli, written about his time in exile and under house arrest during World War II.  Levi, an Italian Jewish doctor and painter, was sent to a small village in Southern Italy.  He wrote about the extreme poverty of the peasants of the region who felt they had been forgotten when Christianity and civilization stopped north of them in the town of Eboli.  He describes a visit from his sister, also a doctor, who had stopped in Matera on her way to visit Carlo.  This is how she described what she had seen in the cave dwellings:

“The facades of the caves were like a row of white houses; the holes of the doorways stared at me like black eyes. . . .As I went by I could see into the caves, whose only light came in through the front doors.  In these dark holes with walls cut out of the earth I saw a few pieces of miserable furniture and some ragged clothes hanging up to dry.  Most families have just one cave to live in and here they sleep all together: men, women, children, and animals.  This is how twenty thousand people live. . . . The women, when they saw me look in the doors, asked me to come in, and in the dark, smelly caves where they lived I saw children lying on the floor under torn blankets, with their teeth chattering from fever.  The thin women, with dirty, undernourished babies hanging at their flaccid breasts, spoke to me mildly and with despair.  I felt as if I were in a city stricken by the plague.”. . .

It was this description of the indescribable misery, poverty, and illness of these residents that led the Italian government in the 1950s to move the occupants out of the caves and to begin to clean up the mess.  Now the Sassi are a major tourist destination with bed-and-breakfasts, restaurants, and shops occupying reclaimed and renovated cave.

In another mountain town, Alberobello, the fourteenth-century peasants were compelled by the land owner to build round stone huts without mortar or windows so that he wouldn’t have to pay taxes to the king for houses on his property.  After the peasants appealed to the king, their unique housing style was modified to include windows and other fixes to make them more livable.  

There are more than a thousand of these houses—trulli—standing in the town of Alberobello alone.  Again, they have been remodeled to house a variety of businesses and are available for tourists as bed and breakfast rentals. 

What was old becomes new again.