From the moment that I decided to step away from my teaching role and commit to at least a couple of years of walking and writing, I knew, of course, that I would finish the US walk. At the same time, though, I also had this walk through Italy top of mind, to the extent that they functioned as a sort of paired set.
There are a few reasons that Italy held such prominence for me. First, and simplest of all, it has been a long time since I walked in Italy. After I led my first student group on the Camino in 2004, we quickly decided to run it back in 2005 on the Via Francigena. While that first walk was a bumpy road, over time the Via Francigena became one of the core routes that we returned to, but I haven’t returned since 2017. That’s way too many years without proper gelato. Second, and equally straightforward, unlike in 2017, it’s possible now to walk the length of Italy–twice, in fact–mostly following pilgrim (or pilgrim-inspired) roads.
Third, and more complicated, Italy pairs up with the United States in a variety of interesting ways. First, both are “divided” states, with the north/south divisions in Italy offering a parallel to the coast/middle split in the US. The US has been quite successful, with plenty of qualifications to be added, of course, at building a national identity, while Italy has struggled massively in that endeavor. The US is still a very young country, and while Italy is younger as a state, it inherits millennia of history and layers of colonization. I’m interested, too, in the central role of the Church in Italy, and how that contrasts with America’s more Protestant influences. For all of those reasons and more, Italy seemed like a great mirror through which to think back on the US trek, while also–let’s be honest here–having much more consistently enjoyable walking.
I chose Matera as my starting point because, as the oldest continuously inhabited city in Italy, and in the running for the oldest in the world–one might think that this would be an easy thing to measure, but it turns out to be quite complicated–it seemed like a suitable entry point for this three-month walk through antiquity. I also wanted to hit as many different major Italian “camminos” as possible, and this ensured that I would be able to spend some time on the Materano.
Getting here from the PNW was, understandably, a laborious process. Fortunately, I flew out of Seattle instead of Portland; the latter was slowed down by snow and ice, so I probably would have missed my connection if I had departed from there. Instead, it was smooth sailing through Minneapolis, which had plenty of snow in its own right, but knows how to deal with it. I spent most of a day wandering around London, before I crashed at Stansted, flying onward to Bari the next morning on RyanAir. It has been a while since I flew on RyanAir, which over time shifted from a good budget option to a pain-in-the-ass tightwad, but this was fine. The main thing to keep in mind is that you’ll have to pay 30-40 euros above the quoted price to carry your pack onboard, but in my case that still made the flight to Bari much cheaper than the other options. In Bari, there’s a quick and easy train from the airport to the city center, and then multiple buses running to Matera in about an hour.
In Matera, there’s a hostel associated with the Cammino Materano–the Ostello dei Sassi. It’s 20 euros for a bed, and this time of year it’s pretty empty. There was one other person here last night, an Italian walker who just finished the Bari-Matera branch of the Materano. As of now, I’m the only one. There’s a small kitchen, too, which is handy. The Cammino Materano’s office is nearby, staffed upon request, but they just dropped off a credential for me at the desk here, complete with the first stamp of the walk.
It’s most helpful, I think, to consider Matera as a four-layered city:
Layer 1 – The canyon. This morning, I set out immediately for the canyon, descending spiraling roads and twisting staircases before emerging onto an “expert-level” trail that led me down to the Gravina River. The hill shoots up sharply on the other side of the river, and the trail climbed steadily to the top, passing a pair of old cave churches along the way. The murals inside date to the 7th century, and while access is gated off, it’s still possible to catch a glimpse of the treasures inside.
Layer 2 – The sassi. These are the old troglodyte houses, where the earliest settlements–dating to some point in the Paleolithic era, with estimates ranging from 10,000+ years ago to 3,000–were established in cave dwellings. These were still the primary residences for most Materanos in the early 20th century, but an initiative in the 1950s relocated most of those people to newer, modern housing on the outskirts. Not too long after, though, many of those emptied structures were purchased by investors and transformed into hotels and restaurants. This time of year, many of those tourist-focused services are closed, so the sassi–there are two main sections of it, jutting down from the upper levels–are particularly quiet. These are the areas that have drawn filmmakers for decades to Matera, looking for a more stable space to employ as a fictional Jerusalem.
Layer 3 – The Civita, or “historic” town. This elevated area, situated on a hilltop between the two sassi, is where you’ll find the duomo (cathedral) and other important structures built in the second millennium AD. These are still primarily built with similar rock to the sassi below, so it can be harder to discern where one layer ends and the next begins, but it largely reflects a transition from caves to purpose-built edifices
Layer 4 – The modern town. This sprawls along paved roads, generally running parallel to the Gravina. Cars can move through the “historic” zone and some limited parts of the sassi, but most everything here is from the last century
Below, you can get a sense of the layers–the grassy canyon, yielding to the sassi around the middle, with the Civita atop the right side of the image and the more modern city upper-left (with the 16th-century castle sitting just left of the middle).
It’s a remarkable place and I’m thrilled to have spent a day and two nights here. I’m equally excited, though, to get the walk underway tomorrow.
