The Park of the Quarries of Matera
The inspiring principle of the Park of the eighteenth-century Quarries of Matera is that of the relationship between the city and the Murgia from which it originated. Rugged but not stingy land, mother and not stepmother, offers the riches of nature to those who can grasp them.
Even the stone is generous “ancient and primordial” material for the space of man, green and scorched by a “fiercely ancient sun […] that is in the memory, with as much physicality that in the hour when it is high, and goes into the sky, towards endless sunsets […]”.
The nature of the Cave area is a lithic monument of the stories of the population that thanks to that stone created its fortune, reached its shape, strengthening and recreating, in every era, its own identity.
The park of the “Cave System” aims to recover and reconnect a strategic portion of the territory of the suburbs of Matera close to the link of Via Appia.
In fact, it is from the current location of the Appian Way that a journey begins to rediscover the local material culture that has led to a so deep anthropization of the territory that in the eighteenth-century quarries is particularly strong and visible. The proposed route aims to lead to the rediscovery of the historical link with the territory to rediscover the ancient paths that determined the settlement in this site.
The site is peculiarly important as urban and cultural access to the city of Matera precisely because it is located, from an anthropological point of view:
– In correspondence of the quarries “Eighteenth century” (but we will discover visiting them dating back at least to the “1660”); constituting the material origin of the stone with which the city was built in its best forms.
– In correspondence of the elevation of the calcarenitic relief hollowed out by the “gorge” of the Gravina torrent; and it would be more correct to say from the “ravine of the Gravina torrent” since the watercourse shares the name with the peculiar morpholithological conformation of the karst crevasse that generates in its course. And it is this peculiar morphological configuration, with its succession of karstic balsas, that defines the orographic course on which the traditional path of access to the “Sassi” of the city has conformed. On the edge of the urban border, there are places of good wishes for the incipient journey, for those who depart, or to whom to give thanks for the grateful return. The altar of San Rocco on the edge of the area overlooking Via San Vito and the altar of Sant’Antuono central area, are the material evidence of the anthropological importance of the area for the construction and development of the city of Sassi.
And from the Geo-lithological point of view:
– The great limestone plateau of the murgia materana has given numerous finds of marine cetaceans evidencing the character of land emerged of the Tertiary era. These fossils indicate a peculiar characteristic that is precisely the generative characteristic of the murgia itself.
– It is precisely from the Sea that we owe the birth of this balsa of calcarenite of seabed sediments that continue to tell us, through the progressive fossil discoveries that add up and stratify at every opportunity of excavation, as from water and sea the earth of Matera is born, matrix of the life of history and culture that in this park want to be told.
– In Roman times the route of the Appian Way connects Matera to the Ionian coast strengthening the icon of the journey of the bos Lassus from which (according to myth) we owe the location of the city of Matera confirming the strong and ineludibile relationship between land and sea.
