For the place
Sextantio Le Grotte della Civita
Matera · Basilicata
Matera is one of the oldest inhabited places on earth, and until the 1950s families still lived in these caves, people and animals under the same vault, in conditions that became known as a national shame before the state emptied them out. Le Grotte della Civita puts a handful of them back into careful use. It sits in the Civita, the oldest quarter of the Sassi, its rooms cut into the rock on the lip of the Gravina, the ravine that divides the town from the Murgia and its rock-hewn churches. There are eighteen, some of them enormous, over 160 square metres of vaulted stone. Daniele Kihlgren, who began the Sextantio project up in the Abruzzo hills, restored them without smoothing anything over. Bare walls, a bed, a deep tub set into the floor, little else. There are no televisions, and once the sun goes the switches give way to candles.
Breakfast is the set piece. It is laid in the Cripta della Civita, a cave church from the thirteenth century that now works as the common room, and it is local and organic: Lucanian cheeses, bread still warm, preserves made nearby. Dinner can be arranged in the same room by candlelight, or out on the terrace when the weather holds, with the Murgia turning gold across the ravine. The cooking is plain and regional, and it is wise enough not to compete with the setting. It would lose.
We tend to reward restraint, and here it is taken to its edge. Nothing is comfortable in the resort sense. The caves run cool and dim, the quiet is complete, and anyone after a swim-up bar has come to the wrong rock. What you get instead is the rare feeling of sleeping inside a place rather than next to it, in rooms that were homes for a thousand years and were nearly lost for good. Kihlgren's argument, that the most radical luxury left is authenticity kept intact, is made better here than almost anywhere. Bring a jumper, and go in spring or autumn.
