A shepherd used it as shelter for himself and his animals, and the name going round was grotta dei Cento Santi, the cave of the Hundred Saints; under that name the church cut into the wall of the Gravina di Picciano also turns up in Domenico Ridola's notes. On 1 May 1963 members of the La Scaletta club found it again, and restoration followed. What had survived inside, painted between the eighth and the ninth century, earned the crypt of Original Sin its nickname: the Sistine Chapel of rock-cut art.
What to see
The frescoes cover the left-hand wall and the end wall, and they are the work of a single hand that scholars call the Painter of the Flowers of Matera: perhaps a Benedictine, since the cave community very probably belonged to the Benedictine order. The painting is plainly Lombard in stamp, borrowing little from Byzantine art, which reached Italy with the Eastern popes, and something from Roman painting: simple drawn lines, rich clothing, expressive faces.
Three niches in the left-hand wall hold three triads: the Apostles Peter, Andrew and John; the Virgin Queens, that is the Madonna and Child, or Basilissa, with two further female figures; the Archangels Michael, Gabriel and Raphael. The end wall moves to the Old Testament and tells the Genesis story, the Creation and that Original Sin which gave the church its name. Paintings of flowers complete the cycle and gave the anonymous painter his name, and every scene carries a Latin inscription.
Visiting
The crypt lies outside the urban perimeter of Matera, along the wall of the Gravina di Picciano: it is not a stop in the Sassi, and you have to leave the city to reach it. There is a single chamber, and the long abandonment has made the original layout hard to reconstruct; look straight at the two painted walls, because the poor condition of the remaining frescoes leaves even their subject uncertain.
Our editors' tip
Read the Latin inscriptions before you look at the figures: one accompanies each scene and works as a caption. They matter most on the left-hand wall, where the three niches line up Apostles, Virgin Queens and Archangels in an order that is not obvious at first sight.