Matera

Italy

Description

Known as la città sotterranea ("the underground city"), its historical centre "Sassi" contains ancient cave dwellings from the Paleolithic period (10th millennium BC). If continually inhabited as Leonardo A. Chisena has suggested it would be one of the oldest continually inhabited settlements in the world; alternatively it has been suggested by Anne Parmly Toxey that the site has been "occupied continuously for at least three millennia and occupied sporadically for 150-700 millennia prior to this".[5] Sassi, along with the park of the Rupestrian Churches, was awarded World Heritage Site status by UNESCO since 1993. [Source Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matera).