Sassi di Matera
— a hillside that turns to lamplight.
Not only on a wall.
“Two districts carved into the soft limestone above the Gravina ravine. Sasso Caveoso to the south, Sasso Barisano to the north, with the cathedral on the ridge between them. Some of the dwellings were occupied without interruption from the Paleolithic until the 1950s, one of the longest unbroken records of human settlement anywhere. The town emptied for a few decades, then came back. At dusk the whole hillside warms to the colour of a banked fire, lamp by lamp by lamp.
Sassi di Matera, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
The Sassi are two cave-dwelling districts carved into a limestone ridge above the Gravina di Matera river canyon, in the city of Matera in the Basilicata region of southern Italy. Sasso Caveoso lies to the south and Sasso Barisano to the north; the medieval Cattedrale di Matera, completed in 1270, sits on the Civita ridge that separates them. Across the ravine is the Parco della Murgia Materana, a regional park of roughly 8,000 hectares that holds more than 150 rock-cut churches dating from the eighth to the thirteenth century. The site was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1993, and Matera served as a European Capital of Culture in 2019.
The stone is calcarenite, a soft honey-coloured marine limestone the locals call tufa, easily carved and hardening on exposure to air. Settlement here goes back tens of thousands of years; some scholars argue the Paleolithic-era caves make this one of the longest continuously inhabited sites on earth. The houses were not built on the rock so much as dug into it: cisterns, dovecotes, and entire churches share walls with the cliffside. Over 150 rupestrian churches survive in the Sassi and the Murgia across the ravine, several still bearing Byzantine frescoes from before the Norman conquest. The same stone built the 1270 Cattedrale di Matera on the Civita ridge above.
The Sassi are open and walkable in any season, with no admission to the districts themselves; individual cave churches such as Santa Maria de Idris and the Convicinio di Sant'Antonio charge small entry fees. The 1950s were a turning point: after Carlo Levi's 1945 book Christ Stopped at Eboli drew national attention to the poverty here, the Italian government relocated roughly 15,000 residents out of the caves between 1952 and the late 1960s. The Sassi sat largely abandoned until restoration began in the 1980s. Many of the cave dwellings have since been converted into hotels, restaurants, and small museums, and Matera served as the backdrop for The Passion of the Christ in 2004 and No Time to Die in 2021.