There are hotels with interesting design, and then there are places where the building itself is the oldest thing you have ever slept inside. Sextantio Le Grotte della Civita is the latter, by several thousand years.
Matera is one of the world’s continuously inhabited settlements, its cave dwellings carved into the tufa rock of a dramatic ravine in the Basilicata region of southern Italy. The UNESCO-listed Sassi quarters where the hotel sits were home to people living in precisely these caves well into the 1950s, when the Italian government, embarrassed by the conditions, forcibly relocated thousands of residents to a new town on the plateau above. The caves were left exactly as they were. And there they remained, abandoned and slowly filling with rubble, until Daniele Kihlgren arrived.
Kihlgren, a Swedish-Italian entrepreneur with a background in philosophy and an eye for what others overlook, had already restored an abandoned medieval village in Abruzzo under the Sextantio name. When he found the Sassi, he spent a decade working with traditional tools and indigenous materials to return 18 of the caves to habitable condition, without erasing what had happened inside them. This was not renovation in the usual sense. It was an act of radical restraint: removing the rubble, reinforcing the rock, adding the finest bathtubs money could buy, and leaving everything else alone. The carved arches, the pocked stone walls, the original floor surfaces, the ancient cisterns, the traces of the lives lived here over millennia: all of it still present, still breathing.
What Kihlgren created is classified as an albergo diffuso, a dispersed hotel, where the 18 rooms, the reception in a former Benedictine monastery cell, the Cripta della Civita common room in a 13th-century rock church, and the rooftop breakfast terrace are all connected by the narrow stone lanes of the Sassi rather than by corridors. You navigate between them the way the original inhabitants navigated this hillside: on foot, in the open air, past cave openings and ancient doorways, with the Murgia gorge dropping away below you.
The rooms range from around 45 to over 160 square metres. Some have freestanding bathtubs positioned in the rock face. Some have kitchenettes. All have antique linen, candles, locally made bath products, and a near-total absence of anything that did not need to be there. The deliberate sparseness is not austerity. It is deference. The cave is the room. Everything else is in service of that fact.
There is no restaurant in the conventional sense. Breakfast, a generous spread of local produce, yoghurt, mozzarella, bread, fruit and pastries, is served on the panoramic terrace overlooking the Gravina gorge and the rock-hewn churches of Murgia Park. For an exceptional evening, it is possible to book an exclusive private dinner inside the Cripta della Civita itself: candlelit, vaulted, with roughly a thousand years of stone arching overhead. Cooking of this quality in a setting this old is an experience that is difficult to prepare yourself for and impossible to forget.
Matera was European Capital of Culture in 2019, and the city that surrounds the hotel has kept pace with that recognition without losing its strange, layered authenticity. The streets above the Sassi have excellent restaurants, galleries, and a food culture rooted in the cucina povera tradition of southern Italy: simple ingredients, ancestral technique, remarkable results. But most guests find they spend the majority of their time simply wandering the Sassi themselves, losing the thread of their route among the lanes, and not especially minding.
The Details
- 18 cave rooms and suites set within the UNESCO World Heritage Sassi di Matera, ranging from 45 to over 160 square metres
- Albergo diffuso format: rooms, reception, and common areas dispersed across the ancient Civita quarter
- Reception housed in a former Benedictine monastery cell
- Cripta della Civita: a 13th-century rock church available for exclusive private dining
- Panoramic rooftop breakfast terrace overlooking the Murgia gorge
- In-room massages available on request
- Antique linens, locally made bath products, and candles throughout
- One Michelin Key 2024 and 2025; member of Design Hotels and Leading Hotels of the World
