Sextantio Le Grotte della Civita

In 1952, Italian Prime Minister Alcide De Gasperi stood in Matera and called it la vergogna d’Italia: the shame of Italy. The people living in the sassi — the cave dwellings cut into the ravines of this Basilicata hilltown — had no running water, no electricity, and shared their spaces with their animals. The government forcibly relocated them within a decade. The caves sat empty for thirty years.

Seventy years later, those same caves hold some of the most sought-after hotel rooms in Italy.

Sextantio Le Grotte della Civita is the work of architect and entrepreneur Daniele Kihlgren, who came to Matera in the early 2000s and developed a philosophy he calls “conservative restoration”: recover what exists, expose what the original material looks like, add only what the body genuinely requires. Eighteen interconnected cave chambers have been treated accordingly. The pale tuff-stone walls stay rough. The vaulted ceilings show every natural irregularity of the rock. The floors are original stone. What Kihlgren placed inside is held to an exacting standard: quality beds, bathrooms integrated so carefully that the fittings read as discreet insertions rather than renovations, and lighting that is soft, low, and largely candlelit. The result is not a hotel that imitates a cave. It is a cave that has been made comfortable.

The Rooms

No two cave suites are the same, because no two chambers in a hillside occupied for nine millennia are the same. Some have barrel-vaulted ceilings at low, intimate height. Others open into tall irregular spaces where natural light falls from a shaft cut through the rock overhead. Terracotta and stone dominate throughout. Beds are positioned against ancient walls. The caves stay naturally cool in summer, which in Matera’s southern Italian heat is a real and daily advantage.

Matera Itself

The address is what most guests remember longest. Walking through the Sasso Caveoso after dinner — when the stone alleys are lit by lanterns and the tour groups have gone — is to move through something that resists easy framing as a tourist experience. Churches cut into cliff faces. Cisterns excavated below the streets. Stone stairways worn smooth by thousands of years of feet. The cathedral above the ravine dates to the 13th century. The caves below it were in continuous use long before that.

Food and Wine

The hotel restaurant works from the Lucanian kitchen: the cooking of Basilicata, a region that most tourists still don’t know and that is the better for it. Handmade pasta with wild boar ragù, salt cod with dried peppers, lamb slow-cooked with local herbs. The wine list draws on the region’s considerable strengths — Aglianico del Vulture from the volcanic soils to the north, Primitivo from just across the border in Puglia — and the sourcing is taken seriously.

Sextantio is not a hotel that happens to be situated inside a cave. It is a sustained argument that the cave is worth preserving, and that the best way to make that argument is to make the cave somewhere worth staying.