Ah, questions. I consider them when contemplating a route. Where, why, when? I also think about a story for the questions that arise later.
Amidst the beauty of Italy's far south sits Matera. It's very different from other places we've visited on the Italian peninsula and nearby islands. Diving in a bit, we discovered:
Matera’s obscurity ended in 1945, when the Italian artist and author Carlo Levi published his memoir Christ Stopped at Eboli, about his year of political exile in Basilicata under the Fascists. Levi painted a vivid portrait of a forgotten rural world that had, since the unification of Italy in 1870, sunk into a desperate poverty. The book’s title, referring to the town of Eboli near Naples, suggested that Christianity and civilization had never reached the deep south, leaving it a pagan, lawless land, riddled with ancient superstitions, where some shepherds were still believed to commune with wolves. Levi singled out the Sassi for their “tragic beauty” and hallucinogenic aura of decay—“like a schoolboy’s idea of Dante’s Inferno,” he wrote. The town’s prehistoric cave dwellings had by then become “dark holes” riddled with filth and disease, where barnyard animals were kept in dank corners, chickens ran across the dining room tables, and infant mortality rates were horrendous, thanks to rampant malaria, trachoma and dysentery.Fast forward to the current era. The CBS Sunday Morning program published a Matera visit recently:
A few nearby stops along the way:
Exploring Naples: it would be criminal to miss it!Explore in amuz on iOS, android and visionOS.
Trulli Houses and Taxes
Southern Italy Lodging: AR view
