Matera. An urban story still to be told.

Matera, made famous by the publication of the book “Christ stopped at Eboli” in 1949 was, from the 1950s onwards, the main topic of a cultural debate that had placed the town at the heart of the Great Reconstruction discussion, in a country such as Italy that was heading towards modernity, and that in Matera required a critical angle on the issue Southern Italy versus the Modern. This was a place where experimentation was at home, a town under the spotlight of urbanistic potential; it was just beginning to deal with a law that was to accompany the process of realigning the relations among space, economics and society, and, thanks to the intervention of Adriano Olivetti, became the scene of a large-scale political reformist project that placed this small, unforgotten town of Southern Italy into the heart of an national and international discussion.