The Sassi di Matera sit in the Basilicata region of southern Italy, on the Murgia plateau near Apulia, where the Gravina River carved a deep ravine the locals call La Gravina. The name sasso comes from the Latin saxum, a rock or great stone, and the two ancient districts, the Sasso Caveoso and the Sasso Barisano, are dug directly into the ravine wall. The stone, locally called tufo, is actually calcarenite, a marine limestone of compressed fossil and rock grains that is soft to carve but hardens once exposed to air. Residents removed stone to make rooms, and on the steep slope streets often run across the roofs of the houses below. People have lived here continuously since about 7000 BC.

By the 1950s the caves held crushing poverty: large families shared single-opening rooms with mules, pigs, and chickens, without sewers, and malaria spread. Prime Minister Alcide De Gasperi called the Sassi an affront to the new Italian republic, and the government moved most residents into a new town nearby. Through the 1960s, 70s, and 80s the districts sat largely empty and crumbling. In the late 1980s local officials, the Italian government, and the European Union began regeneration, and in 1993 UNESCO listed the Sassi and the park of the Rupestrian churches as a World Heritage Site. The same untouched look that brought the evictions made Matera a stand-in for ancient Jerusalem and a blockbuster location.

• Why subtractive architecture meant one exposed wall, one source of light, and poor ventilation
• Pier Paolo Pasolini filming The Gospel According to Saint Matthew there in 1964
• The Passion of the Christ in 2004, The Nativity Story in 2006, and Ben-Hur in 2016
• Themyscira in Wonder Woman and a James Bond Aston Martin chase in No Time to Die
• Corde Oblique’s 2016 two-part song I Sassi di Matera, one part for each district