Provincia di Matera

The civil fond is Stato civile, 1809-1915. It ends twelve years before the province itself was created, which is a reminder that the material was inherited from the old Province of Basilicata rather than produced under Matera's own administration.

For the levy the custody is different and the archive explains why. The circondario of Matera formed part of the Ufficio di leva di Bari. Levy lists for the comuni of Matera and province, classes 1862-1920, therefore reach this archive from that office by ordinary transfer — from Bari, in Puglia, not from Potenza in the same region.

That divergence is the practical key. A man born in 1890 in a Materano comune was enrolled through Bari, and his levy record travelled a different institutional path from his birth record. When a search succeeds on one and fails on the other, this is usually the reason.

For anything before 1927, and in particular for the 1809-1865 second copies, check the Archivio di Stato di Potenza as well. Its fond is explicitly the civil status of the province of Basilicata as it then was, and these comuni were inside it.

The civil fond is fully digitised on the portal, which makes the 1809-1915 run workable at distance.

SIUSA gives the Province of Matera's existence from 1927, created from territory previously within the Province of Basilicata. Before that the whole region was one province, and the name Basilicata covers both.

Matera itself is among the oldest continuously inhabited places on earth. The Sassi — the two cave districts, Barisano and Caveoso — are dwellings cut into the tufa of the ravine, occupied since the Neolithic and inhabited without interruption into the twentieth century. By the 1940s some sixteen thousand people lived in them, frequently alongside their animals, without running water or sewerage, with infant mortality among the highest in Italy. Carlo Levi's Cristo si è fermato a Eboli, published in 1945, made the conditions nationally known, and in 1952 a law ordered the forced evacuation of the Sassi. The population was rehoused in new districts built on the plateau above — La Martella, Spine Bianche, Serra Venerdì — between the early 1950s and the 1960s.

That evacuation is the defining event in this province's twentieth-century record. A family address in the Sassi before 1952 and one in a new quarter after it belong to the same people. The Sassi stood empty for decades, were declared a World Heritage site in 1993, and are now hotels and museums — which means a descendant walking through them today is walking through rooms their grandparents were moved out of as a matter of public health.

The rest of the province is the Murgia plateau, the Bradano and Basento valleys, and a short Ionian coast at Metaponto and Policoro that was malarial and nearly empty until twentieth-century reclamation.

Hold two dates in mind: 1927, when the province was created, and 1915, where the civil fond stops. Between them sits a twelve-year window this archive does not cover, and before 1927 Potenza is the other place to ask.

For the levy, remember it came through Bari. If a man cannot be found, the office that enrolled him is a more likely explanation than a lost register.

If the family lived in the Sassi, expect the address to change around 1952 without the people changing. Rehousing records and the new quarters are part of the same family's trail.

Say in advance whether you want civil or military material; the two took different routes here.

The Sassi — Barisano and Caveoso, inhabited from the Neolithic until the 1952 evacuation.

The rupestrian churches — some hundred and fifty carved and frescoed across the ravine and the Murgia.

The Murgia Materana — the plateau across the Gravina, with its transhumance routes.

Montescaglioso — the Benedictine abbey above the Bradano valley.

Craco — abandoned after landslides in the 1960s and left standing.

Metaponto and Policoro — the Ionian strip, reclaimed in the twentieth century.