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Every day, busloads of tourists arrive in select towns in Italy to photograph what they see as beautiful and unique.
Cave dwellings in Matera, cone-roofed houses in Alberobello, and spider-like fishing platforms on stilts in the Adriatic Sea are all examples of unintended, must-see attractions.
The people who built them would be completely puzzled by the attention their utilitarian creations draw today.
None of the three were built for aesthetics. They were built to get around a limitation.
So the restriction came first, and the form adapted to it, incidentally creating something beautiful. When the restriction dissolved, what was left was the beauty that attracts tourists today.
Somehow this involves dodging taxes, but we’ll get to that.
The Sassi di Matera: from shame to fame
The houses carved in the rock in Matera are quite picturesque. Their origins, however, are as humble as it gets.
For most of Matera’s 9,000-year history, people lived in the Sassi (the stones) because carving a home in tufo rock was easy and inexpensive.
The result was dwellings with no water and, in more modern times, no proper bathrooms or electricity. Back in the day, they often were shared with the family mule, which didn’t help hygiene.
By 1950, the population living in the caves was dealing with extreme poverty. Malaria even. The infant mortality rate reached peaks of 44%. When politician Palmiro Togliatti visited, he called them la vergogna nazionale (the national shame). And the then Prime Minister Alcide De Gasperi remarked that people living there could not go on living as animals.
Two years later, a special law was passed that forced the evacuation of roughly 15,000 people to accommodation on the nearby plain. The doors were sealed, and the Sassi sat quietly for thirty years.
Eventually the revival, including modern amenities, arrived. UNESCO listed them in 1993, Matera was named a European Capital of Culture for 2019, and the disgrace became the reason most people bother visiting Basilicata.
Today you can book a cave in the Sasso Barisano district and pay €200-€400 per night for the experience and the mule’s old spot.
Matera’s history is one of struggle and the incredible beauty that emerged from it.
The next town’s beauty came out of deception.
Alberobello and the trulli tax dodge
Alberobello’s origins don’t share the same poverty story as Matera. It is instead a tale about a feudal family and the farmers who worked their land.
Under the Kingdom of Naples, creating a new settlement required the crown’s permission, and it incurred taxation (a rule called the Prammatica De Baronibus).
The Acquaviva counts of Conversano didn’t like the idea of paying a tax. So they ordered their peasants to build dry stone houses that could be easily dismantled. The convenient side effect was that the counts could also kick out unwelcome tenants. There are no tenant rights or squatting attempts when the whole house can be collapsed in two hours without heavy machinery.
When a royal inspector approached, all of the houses in Alberobello would come down, leaving a clearly nontaxable field of rubble. After the inspector left, or (if it went to court) after the court case was settled, the peasants would return and rebuild.
In 1797, Ferdinand IV freed the town and made mortar legal. The first house that used it is Casa d’Amore, which still stands. UNESCO listed the trulli in 1996.
The cone you line up to photograph is essentially an ancient tax scam with a pretty roof.
Historians argue about the origin story, since Alberobello didn’t invent the structures and they offer other benefits in a very hot climate. But tax dodging was definitely part of Alberobello’s history.
Trabocchi, built by people afraid of the sea
The trabocchi of the Abruzzo coast are big wooden platforms on stilts, with spider-like arms holding nets. You can find them concentrated around the province of Chieti, from Ortona to San Salvo.
The point was fishing without a boat. In fact, the men who built them were mostly farmers rather than fishermen. Men who often couldn’t swim or were downright scared of being at sea (in fairness, for good reason, since people died at sea all the time back then). So they engineered fishing machines instead of becoming sailors.
Trabocchi look quite sketchy in photos, but they are actually well-built and solid. They definitely stood the test of time as well, since they date back to the 1700s. (With some sources indicating their possible existence as early as the 1200s.)
At any rate, that fear led to engineering, which ultimately produced beautiful architecture. These days, they are often turned into seafood restaurants.
The pattern is clear: a constraint leads to a workaround, which is then abandoned or seen as problematic, only to be reevaluated later on and promoted to a tourist attraction.
The price of fame
Now that the Sassi, trulli, and trabocchi are world famous, their price tags have skyrocketed. And since they are so unique and rare, the state heavily regulates them, making changes difficult.
A large share of Matera’s Sassi are not even private property. People get them on long concessions rather than buying them outright. The real cost then becomes the full restoration using heritage rules.
You can spend a small fortune to live in a cave that you don’t even own, restored to standards you did not choose.
Listings for privately owned ones will use fancy terms like hypogeum, but make no mistake, you’re buying a cave you cannot change for the most part, at the price of a real house in nearby comuni (municipalities).
You can technically take over a trabucco as well, but much like the Sassi, they are on concession and rarely come up on the market.
When it comes to trulli, you can buy a finished and renovated one for €250,000 or more. Or you can get one da ristrutturare (to be renovated) for as little as €30,000.
Tempting right? I get it. It’s such a unique setting. Well, that is until you realize the caveats.
Many trulli are protected under heritage law (Legislative Decree 42/2004). In Alberobello, you cannot demolish one, add a floor, or reshape the conical roof however you like.
Restoring a roof requires one of the few experts who know how, by hand, stone by stone, to the tune of €1,500-2,000 per square meter.
Adding a window means getting through three feet of wall containing two layers of dry stone and rubble in the middle. That is, if you get approval.
The irony of it all is that the trullo was engineered so that a man could pull a stone and drop the roof before a tax collector arrived. Now it takes a permit and a heritage architect to move that same stone.
I’ve been to Matera twice in the past 8 years. The first was a day trip. The second we stayed in a renovated stone walled(not caved) home owned by a woman raised there. Friends stayed in a sassi concession. We made the right call. Had a small shared courtyard in front with a wonderful slot view and close access to the cathedral piazza. The courtyard made it feel like a secluded hill town rather than a crowded museum.
I think about Matera a lot, for its lessons in vision, public investment, cultural recovery and tourism. Both for the miraculous recovery and the honest assessment of perhaps too much of a good thing. Everybody goes to the actual newish residential area for evening activities. The community would benefit by allowing a greater percentage of full time residents. The local Don seemed shocked when we asked if his actual church offered a Mass we could attend. Again, no babies in sight.
You touch on an important and largely hidden aspect of what is involved regarding restoring buildings in Italy . Now a complicated and expensive undertaking which also increasingly negatively affects all in the sector