09/25/2026
Traveling Towel and the Santa Maria de Idris, Matera’s remarkable rock church carved into the limestone of the Sassi.
•
From the outside, it looks almost inseparable from the cliff itself. Inside, centuries-old frescoes cover the walls — a sacred space shaped directly from the rock.
•
Then night falls.
•
The same church is illuminated against the darkness, glowing above Matera like something from another world. The Sassi are beautiful by day, but after sunset they become mysterious, almost cinematic.
•
And on the last 3 pictures / video you can see the darker side of Matera’s underground history.
•
In the crypt of San Pietro Barisano, beneath the church, you can see rooms with niches where bodies were once placed to decompose and drain. This was part of an old funerary practice known as colatoio, or “draining.”
•
The bodies of deceased members of the community were seated or placed in stone niches, allowing the fluids to drain away. After the decomposition process, the bones were cleaned and transferred to an ossuary or buried elsewhere.
•
It sounds shocking today — and it must have been an unpleasant, even disturbing process. But in a crowded underground city where burial space was limited, this ritual was connected to religious beliefs about purification, death and the transition to the afterlife.
•
The crypt is quiet now, but the niches remain — a haunting reminder that Matera’s caves were not only homes, churches and cellars. They were also places where people confronted death.
•
From the glowing rock churches above ground to the eerie crypts below, Matera is a city of layers — beautiful, ancient and just a little spooky.
•
Traveling Towel — going beyond the view to discover the stories inside it. 🤍
•
