The Limestone Landscape of Matera
Matera is built on and into a limestone plateau cut by two deep ravines, the Gravina and the Juramano. The limestone — locally called calcarenite — shares some properties with the tufa of Orvieto but differs in an important way: it is harder, denser, and less porous. Cutting it required more effort, but the resulting spaces were more durable and less prone to water infiltration from above.
The city's sassi districts, Sasso Caveoso and Sasso Barisano, contain a layered settlement pattern in which cave rooms, cisterns, and passages were cut at multiple levels over a period spanning from the Neolithic to the mid-twentieth century. UNESCO designated the sassi a World Heritage Site in 1993, citing their outstanding universal value as a continuous record of human habitation and adaptation to a specific geological environment.
The Cistern System
Water collection was the primary driver of underground construction in Matera. The city receives approximately 500 millimetres of rainfall annually, concentrated in autumn and winter. During summer months, the plateau dried almost completely, and the storage of water against drought was not an optional infrastructure improvement but a condition of survival.
The cisterns of Matera were not a single coordinated project but an accumulation of individual and communal investments spread across many centuries. Each cave dwelling typically had its own small cistern cut directly into the floor or walls, collecting rainwater from the roof through channels carved into the rock surface. Larger cisterns served multiple households and were located at points where surface runoff naturally converged.
The largest documented cistern in Matera, the Palombaro Lungo beneath Piazza Vittorio Veneto, has a capacity of approximately 5,000 cubic metres. It was constructed between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries and remained in use as a public water source until 1959. The chamber is roughly 50 metres long, 15 metres wide, and reaches a depth of 15 metres at its lowest point. Columns of uncut limestone were left standing during excavation to support the ceiling, giving the interior a cathedral-like appearance that has been documented extensively by archaeologists and photographers.
Storage Vaults Alongside Water Infrastructure
The cisterns were not the only underground spaces in the sassi. Adjacent to water storage rooms, and sometimes integrated into the same complex, there are smaller chambers that were clearly used for food storage rather than water. These rooms are identifiable by the absence of waterproof plaster — the white calce coating applied to cistern walls to prevent seepage — and by wall recesses at standardised heights consistent with shelving.
Survey work conducted by the Ente Parco della Murgia Materana and the Fondazione Zètema has identified more than 150 distinct cisterns and an approximately equal number of storage chambers in the documented areas of the sassi. Many of these spaces are still partially filled with sediment and have not been fully excavated. The total number is believed to be considerably higher.
The storage chambers reached temperatures between 10 °C and 14 °C during summer months, depending on depth and the local thermal properties of the limestone at that location. This range was adequate for the preservation of cured meats, hard cheeses, wine, oil, and dried legumes — the staple foods of Basilicata's rural economy through the medieval and early modern periods.
Integration with Cave Dwellings
What distinguishes the Matera underground from comparable systems in Umbria or Lazio is its integration with inhabited space. In Orvieto, the cellars were primarily a commercial infrastructure separate from domestic life. In Matera, the cisterns and storage rooms were physically part of the dwellings. The same cave that served as a family's living room might open directly into a storage chamber, with the cistern located beneath a stone-paved floor accessible through a fitted lid.
This arrangement had practical consequences for the management of temperature. The stone walls separating the living area from the storage room had sufficient thermal mass to moderate temperature swings, and residents could regulate airflow through the cave entrance and any secondary openings to adjust conditions in both spaces simultaneously.
When the Italian government relocated the sassi population to new housing between 1952 and 1968 — a process described in detail by Carlo Levi and other writers of the period — the cave dwellings were abandoned. The cisterns and storage rooms were sealed or left to accumulate debris. Subsequent restoration work, which began seriously in the 1980s, has reopened many of these spaces, though the underground infrastructure as a whole remains only partially documented.
Current Documentation Efforts
The most comprehensive current documentation project is the Matera 2019 Foundation's archaeological mapping initiative, which produced georeferenced surveys of the cistern network in the Sasso Caveoso district. The results are partially available through the Italian National Statistical Institute's regional heritage databases.
The sassi of Matera — Wikipedia entry provides an accessible summary of the settlement history, with references to primary archaeological sources.