In Matera, Italy, nothing holds a candle to the caves

We came for the caves. We stayed for the candles.

You might already know the Sassi di Matera. Despite (or because of?) this architectural wonder’s remoteness in the instep of Italy’s boot, Daniel Craig found trouble here in the most recent James Bond movie, and it has backdropped countless other films and TV shows. Storytellers come for the same reasons tourists do: for the breathtaking, nearly biblical look of the place. And the now famous – once infamous – caves. 

Humans started scratching the caves into Matera’s limestone hillsides 9,000 years ago, establishing perhaps the oldest continuous settlement in Europe. In medieval times, facades were added, roads laid. But the caves were never touched by the 20th century – or even the 19th. By the 1950s, about 16,000 people still lived in the caves without water or drainage or heat, their barn animals sleeping beneath their beds. “The shame of Italy,” it was called, and the government removed the entire population to an adjacent plateau. The city was left to die.

Instead, it was rediscovered, not least by all the moviemakers. Artists began to squat. Preservationists got obsessed. UNESCO named Matera a World Heritage Site in 1993, and then came the alberghi diffusi – hotels made of rehabbed dwellings scattered throughout the city. Ancient cave homes were cleaned, ventilated, electrified, kitted out with bathrooms. But the patina remained – stone walls left charred where cookfires had been. We booked one and were handed a street map to find it.

It was there we encountered the candles. In our room were a dozen fat, honeyed, somehow smokeless and everlasting columns playing light over rock vaults where lives had been lived for thousands of years.

Have you slept in a cave? Recommended. A rare enchantment.