History Lesson

is the ability to reinterpret the past with a futuristic view,” declares Simone Micheli, the architect responsible for the cave dwellings. Thought to be one of the earliest continuously inhabited places on earth, the network of cliffside homes is burrowed deep into a soft white calcarenitic rock known locally as tufo. Residents were moved out of the caves en masse in the 1950s for hygienic reasons, but recently Matera has seen architects and entrepreneurs – spurred on by its designation as the 2019 European Capital of Culture and an expected tourism boom – reimagine and repopulate the historic city.