Free Seasons in Basilicata by David Yeadon Page B

dapples, illuminating the cliffs with dark bronze hollows of hundreds of hand-hewn caves and the dazzling patches of peach ochre, where landslides have sliced away sections of strata and revealed its rich, creamy interior.
  The amazing variety of texture and light falling on flat planes of rock, the gradations of shadow and those enticing niches that appear totally in shade, but when you peer closer, you can see that golden glow of reflected light that seems almost to exude from inside the stone itself.
  And despite this exuberance and dominance of stone, small violently overgrown patches of grasses and bushes and cacti and even two solitary dwarf palms are all sinewing in snakelike intensity on perches along the bright white and deeply eroded contours of this magnificently gouged-out bedrock gorge.
  Gradually the cliffs and lower hollows and caves are merging—almost like osmosis—with the first Paleolithic dwellings and then into the eighth-to twelfth-century walls and houses and church façades carved directly into the rock. Then more cubist projections of houses combining traditional block by golden block of carved stones with ancient cave interiors. Then flowing higher into staircases and over-hangs and arches and tunnels and balustrades carved directly out of the bedrock. Soaring, soaring, higher and higher. Each level a little more sophisticated and finessed than the one below it—a sort of vertical history of form and of man from prehistoric times through early Byzantine cave churches, with their religious wall paintings still intact, and all culminating in that one gloriously slender and simple tower of the twelfth-century cathedral, built on the site of the sixth-century Church of Sant’ Eustachio.
  The whole ancient Sassi town seems to be moving, undulating, breathing like a living creature. It combines the immensity and strength of form and outline of Henry Moore with the fluid exuberance of van Gogh. Similar colors to Cézanne’s paintings, too, with those more subtle, flickery, restless forms of El Greco, and sudden Fauvist flashes of violent color when a line of washing radiates against the cream beige and golden unity of the Sassi. Even the pantile roofs possess a harmony of colors, darker, fire-burned versions of that golden bedrock clay from which they were formed. And as the sun, glittering now like hammered silver, surges brighter and hotter, the whole place begins to vibrate and radiate, and lines swirl and buckle, and the shimmer starts as the cold air from the canyon below rises up to be simmered in the day’s new heat.
  It gets to the point where it’s not real anymore. I don’t know yet how this sketch will work. I’m trying to give the place form, unity, and structure, and yet it seems to want to disintegrate like a Bacon painting, or even one of those furious Kandinsky “women” works.
  Now I can feel my hand rejoicing in its freedom, and I hardly dare look at the lines because it may all be an utter mess. But it feels so right and powerful, and I sense the town is looking right at me, talking to me, urging me to celebrate its utter uniqueness, its gloriously chaotic nature, and its wildness of spirit and form. Thing is—can I do it?
    I’m finished, at least for the moment. And I’m exhausted in that pleasantly reassuring way when you know that, whatever the outcome, you’ve had a true experience, a real communion with your subject.
    Time for a glass of wine in the piazza.
    Thank you, amazing Matera. Your organic forms will always be in my head when anyone speaks of the “growth of a city.” And I’ll think of—I’ll know—one place in the world that actually looks as though it’s grown out of the ground like a living thing—from gorge, to carved cliffs, to caves, to houses and churches, up and up to the very pinnacle of that beautiful cathedral tower.
    I smiled to myself. The art