The Rupestrian Churches of Matera: What They Are, Where They Are, and Who Has the Keys
The rupestrian churches of Matera are one of the most significant collections of Byzantine painted surfaces in southern Italy, and one of the least visited. The reasons for this are partly physical — the churches are underground, require unlocking, and several are accessible only through narrow passages — and partly institutional: the management of access is divided between the municipality, the diocese, the Soprintendenza, and several private landowners, which produces a coordination challenge that most visits do not resolve. Understanding what the churches contain and how to see them properly is the starting point for a Matera visit of genuine art-historical content.
What Rupestrian Means
Rupestrian (from the Latin rupestris — of the rocks) describes churches, chapels, and hermitage complexes carved directly into the tufa limestone of the Gravina ravine walls. The practice in Matera begins with the first hermitic monks of the early Byzantine period — probably the seventh century CE, as Byzantine influence in southern Italy strengthened following the Lombard invasions of the sixth century — who used the natural caves of the ravine as places of individual retreat. Over the following five centuries, the practice expanded: hermit cells became small monastic communities, natural caves became carved churches, and the flat walls of the cave interiors became the surfaces for fresco cycles depicting the standard iconographic programme of Byzantine religious art — the Deesis, the Pantocrator, cycles from the lives of the saints, the Dormition of the Virgin.
The Significant Churches
The Cripta del Peccato Originale (the Crypt of Original Sin), at Picciano, 14 kilometres from Matera, is the most famous single rupestrian fresco cycle in the area — an eighth-century cave chapel with a nearly complete programme depicting the Creation, the Fall, and a Madonna Odigitria of considerable iconographic quality. It was discovered in 1963, cleaned in the 1990s, and opened for limited visits. The quality of the fresco surface preservation, in the stable underground microclimate, is exceptional.
Within the Sassi themselves, the church of Madonna delle Virtù e San Nicola dei Greci is the most architecturally significant rupestrian complex — three carved levels with traces of several fresco campaigns from the tenth through thirteenth centuries, now open as a museum/exhibition space. The church of Santa Lucia alle Malve has a fragmentary but genuine tenth-century fresco cycle. The Convicinio di Sant'Antonio — four interconnected cave churches on the upper Sasso Caveoso — is the one that most rewards the private arrangement for access, and provides the most direct encounter with the material without a queue.
Private Access to the Rupestrian Churches of Matera
A minority of Matera's rupestrian churches are open on a fixed public schedule; the majority require arrangement through the specific key holder — the parish, the municipal heritage office, or a private landowner. A private guide with established relationships to the key-holder network can unlock the non-public churches for a visit that covers the fresco cycles in detail, explains the iconographic programme in the context of Byzantine art history, and provides the physical experience of being in a carved underground space that the public circuit does not replicate. The October visit — cool underground, the light from the Gravina valley entering through the low church entrance at an angle specific to the autumn sun position — is the best available context for the material.
