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Matera
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The town of
MATERA
itself is unique, with a degree of culture and elegance unusual by southern standards and, in its
sassi
- dwellings dug out of the ravine in tiers - one of the country's oddest urban features. The
sassi
are mainly abandoned now, an eerie troglodyte enclave occupying the lower regions of the city. But until thirty years ago this part of the city was still populated by the poorest of the
materani
.
During the 1950s and 1960s, fifteen thousand people were forcibly removed from the
sassi
and rehoused in modern districts on the outskirts of town. Since then the area has been officially cleaned up and is being gradually repopulated, and in 1993 was made a World Heritage Site. Nowadays it's hard to picture the squalor that previously existed here, as described by Levi's sister, in
Christ Stopped at Eboli
, who compared the
sassi
to Dante's
Inferno
, so horrified was she by their disease-ridden inhabitants. "Never before have I seen such a spectacle of misery," she said. The children had "the wrinkled faces of old men, emaciated by hunger, with hair crawling with lice and encrusted with scabs. Most of them had swollen bellies and faces yellowed and stricken with malaria." Pursuing her, they begged not for coins but for quinine. Other useful information
for tourists (each section contains more specific sub-sections): |
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Italy,
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