Matera 2026, the cave city's Mediterranean year

Matera has done reinvention before. The cave town that Italy once called a national shame, emptied of its last cave dwellers in the 1950s, was a European Capital of Culture in 2019 and never looked back. This year it wears a different sash, one it shares across the water. Matera and Tetouan, in northern Morocco, hold the 2026 Mediterranean Capital of Culture and Dialogue together, under the Union for the Mediterranean and the Anna Lindh Foundation.

The theme is Terre Immerse, immersed lands, and the pitch is dialogue rather than spectacle. Residencies, exhibitions, film. Much of it unfolds inside the Sassi, the honey-coloured warren of rock-cut houses and churches that has been a UNESCO site since 1993. Here are five dates from the programme we would build a visit around.

1. The opening, 20 March. The programme opens on the International Day of Happiness, with a procession that leaves the modern centre and moves down into the Sassi. The first weekend is the one to book if you want the ceremony and not the aftermath.
2. Mimmo Jodice at Palazzo Lanfranchi. The Neapolitan photographer's Mediterraneo shows at Palazzo Lanfranchi from 7 July to 8 November, 83 prints of a silvered, sleepless sea, curated by Carlo Sala. It is the first major exhibition since Jodice died in 2025, and it travels on to Tetouan afterwards. If the year has a single unmissable room, it is this one.
3. Terre Immerse residencies, autumn. Ten cultural organisations host Euro-Mediterranean artists between September and November, with workshops in the old crafts the Sassi were built on, dry-stone walling and the rainwater cisterns that made cave living possible. Quiet work, and the better for it.
4. Matera Film Festival, 7 to 15 November. The seventh edition runs the second week of November, features, documentaries and shorts, with a Mediterranean focus fitting the year. Some of it screens at Casa Cava, the auditorium carved straight out of the tufa in the old town.
5. The other capital, Tetouan. The point of the title is the pairing. Tetouan, the white Andalusian town below the Rif, carries the same year, and the exchange is real. The Jodice show crosses to its Centre d'Art Moderne from December. Two coasts, one sea, which is the whole idea.