Free Seasons in Basilicata by David Yeadon

impassioned writings and speeches led to a special law requiring the forced abandonment of the Sassi and the relocation of more than twenty thousand inhabitants.
    Levi offers a formidable picture of life in Matera in the 1930s, through the eyes and words of his sister, Luisa, also a physician and social activist. She captures a truly Dantesque vision of squalor and poverty:
    The houses were open on account of the heat, and as I went by I could see into the caves, whose only light came in through the front doors. Some of them had no entrance but a trapdoor and ladder. In the dark holes with walls cut out of the earth, I saw a few pieces of miserable furniture, beds and some ragged clothes, hanging up to dry. On the floor lay dogs, sheep, goats and pigs. Most families have just one cave to live in, and there they all sleeptogether; men, women, children and animals. This is how 20,000 people live…. the children have the wizened faces of old men, their bodies reduced by starvation almost to skeletons…most of them had enormous, dilated stomachs, and faces yellow and worn with malaria.
    Only the intervention of UNESCO in 1993 saved the complete destruction of these unique places. Today, so I’d read, massive efforts were under way to restore and rehabilitate the cave dwellings. So successful apparently had such initiatives been that Sassi houses were becoming de rigueur among the young and wealthy, and the canyon dwellings were coming back to life as affluent, fully functioning communities, complete, in many instances, with air-conditioning and all the modern conveniences of the twenty-first century.
    I wandered around a little aimlessly at first, following misleading signs, and then suddenly everything fell into place. Actually dropped would be the more appropriate word because as I followed the slow downhill curve of Via XX Settembre, I landed abruptly and unexpectedly in the vast Piazza Vittorio Veneto, the great passeggiata meeting place of Matera. Bound by elegant and richly adorned churches, a stately library and government center, palazzos, and numerous restaurants, coffee bars, and kiosks, this almost-circular space is the heart of the old city, focal point of all its great festivals and processions, and a prime viewing point (at last) of the great canyonlike bowl containing Sasso Barisano.
    From a shaded belvedere I could peer hundreds of feet down into this amazing bronze-and-cream-colored intensity of ancient urbanity. Clusters of cave houses, their façades often adorned with baroque and classic motifs, tumbled in seeming chaos down the face of the canyon and into the great bowl below. Sinews of alleys and endless staircases and tunneled streets suggested some order and logic to all the confusion. However, as I left the bustle and chatter of the piazza and began an arduous descent down into the Sassi, I quickly realized that such order could really be appreciated only from the belvedere high above.
    I became disoriented. But it didn’t matter. The place possessed such a hobbit-land appeal that I wandered, as I had done in Castelmezzano and Pietrapertosa earlier that morning, as if in some kind of surrealist dream. I peered in at the powerful frescoes of the Byzantine chapels, followed serpentine alleys where the façades of the leaning houses almost touched one another, explored dark underground passageways that suddenly emerged into tiny, bright, flower-bedecked piazzas, and gazed up at the golden glories and delicate slender tower of the duomo, Matera’s great cathedral dating back to 1270 and dedicated to the Madonna della Bruna, a patron saint of the city. I was particularly moved by the Church of Santa Maria di Idris. Carved deep into an enormous, craggy pyramid of golden rock known as Monte Errone, the church had a richly decorated, cool, cryptlike interior adorned with twelfth-century frescoes, whose soft colors glowed almost magically in the half-darkness.
    Somehow I edged and nudged my