Matera: Cave dwellers in southern Italy

From swans.com comes this article on Matera, a town in southern Italy inhabited since the Neolithic age:

The ground under me had been lived in for twelve thousand years. Then in the 1950s the lights went out. It was a conundrum to prick the curiosity of even a footsore tourist with lunch on his mind. I was in the city of Matera in Basilicata (formerly Lucania), the province that sits like a pear on the instep of the Italian boot.

The old city was made up of dwellings, of various layers of sophistication, carved directly out of the rock (like the church at the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, actually an ancient treasury in Jordan). These cave dwellings were inhabited from the stone age through the 1950s, when the Italian government compelled inhabitants to move. Now they are, of course, a tourist attraction. Pin It