I saw this post and my first thought was "hey, those are those cool cave houses in Italy!" Then I read the caption and thought... wait, what happened in the 1950s? Why did people stop living here?
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 civilisation 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 its ‘tragic beauty’ and hallucinogenic aura of decay. The town’s prehistoric cave dwellings had by then become dark holes riddled with filth and disease, where animals lived in the same space with humans, and infant mortality rates were horrendous, thanks to rampant malaria, trachoma and dysentery.
Levi’s book caused an uproar in postwar Italy, and the Sassi became notorious as la vergogna nazionale, the disgrace of the nation.
After a visit in 1950, Italian Prime Minister Alcide De Gasperi was so appalled that he set in motion a draconian plan to relocate the Sassi’s entire population to new housing developments. Italy was flush with funds from the Marshall Plan, and American experts such as Friedrich Friedmann, a philosophy professor at the University of Arkansas, arrived with Italian academics who had studied the mass rural relocation programmes of the Tennessee Valley Authority in the 1930s. The new public houses were designed by Italy’s most avant-garde architects, in a misguided utopian vision that would actually isolate families in dismal, claustrophobic boxes.
All 16,000 residents of the Sassi were rounded up and sent to live in these new housing projects on the land above it leaving behind an empty shell. Soon the Sassi became a ghost town. Some Materan officials suggested that the whole district be walled up and forgotten. Instead, the ancient lanes and paths became overgrown and decrepit, and the Sassi soon gained a reputation for crime, attracting drug dealers, thieves and smugglers. At the same time, its former inhabitants had difficulty adjusting to their new lodgings.
Given a choice, it’s unlikely many would have opted to remain in the Sassi, but nonetheless, they struggled with new lives in separate boxes, without the support of their community that had got them through their previous struggles. They felt the loss of their life lived outdoors - neighbouring families sharing a courtyard to prepare meals together, to support each other. To add to the culture shock, a stigma clung to people from the Sassi. Relocated families pretended they were from other parts of Italy. Many never discussed their previous lives with younger generations, and never went back to the Sassi, even if they lived just a few kilometers away.
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