Patrimonializzazione culturale e cambio di narrazione: il caso dei Sassi di Matera / Cultural Patrimonialization and Narrative Change: the Case of the Sassi of Matera

Narration — including historiography as a particular form of it — assigns meaning and thereby defines the identity of its object, and expresses a value judgment. The destiny of a place is closely bound to the idea the community has of it, and generally, as such narratives consolidate over time, one ends up believing that the idea associated with a place is an expression of its inherent nature. The act that frees the future from the past is the historicization of narratives. Through the genealogical approach, the interpretative practices of historical phenomena are themselves historicized. As an example of the application of a genealogical practice and of narrative change, we examine the case of the Sassi of Matera in Basilicata, which were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1993. With the advent of industrialization in Italy and the postwar economic boom, the Sassi, located in a backward South, came to be regarded as the very emblem of poverty. The reversal of this narrative began between the 1940s and 1960s, by Carlo Levi and Pier Paolo Pasolini with the idea of “peasant civilization” and an archaic, ancestral world. In the case of the Sassi of Matera, inscription on the UNESCO List represented the reversal of the paradigm — from a “national shame” to a site of universal value. The site’s Management Plan was drafted twenty years after inscription on the World Heritage List, and its project outcome constituted a proposal of “generative narrative” — a consciously chosen narrative aimed at ensuring a sustainable future for the place and its community.