Matera

After an illustrious past as a ‘laboratory city’, Matera today finds itself at the centre of attention once again, thanks to it having been declared the European Capital of Culture 2019, and is being rediscovered by national and international tourism. In the middle of the last century, the city – a land hitherto forgotten by history – launched a project of urban reform, which at the same time covered a large territory, to trial a model of development that would guide the project to modernize the south. A city of only 30,000 inhabitants attracted the attention of a whole world of intellectuals, artists and writers who found in this reality, apparently frozen in time, signs of anticipation of the future.