ANTONIO TURNED ON SOME SPOTLIGHTS AND THE CAVE lit up like the inside of a jack-o’-lantern. A chill ran through me.
A skinny man in his thirties, with downturned eyes and short dark hair, Antonio was my guide for the day. He had been part of the team that had restored this painted cave ten years earlier.
We had driven together that morning to the edge of a cliff near the cave city of Matera, the last stop on my reconnaissance trip, just to see this place—this Crypt of the Original Sin. Since I was searching for my own family’s original sin, it seemed a poetic and fitting final destination.
Matera was home to more than 150 painted caves, whose frescoes were created between the eighth and thirteenth centuries AD. But this one—this Crypt of the Original Sin—was supposed to be the most intact and beautiful, known as the Sistine Chapel of cave paintings.
From the highway, Matera resembled a collection of skulls, all looking out into the distance. The rounded doors and windows to many of its hushed caves were black, and against the chalky, treeless landscape resembled eye and nose holes.
Once you got up close, you could see that the caves—called sassi—were carved from tufa rock inside two giant sunken pits, one house haphazardly built atop another like in an Escher drawing. You climbed long, worn stone staircases to get from top to bottom.
Though the caves were created in Paleolithic times, some were painted with religious murals in the Middle Ages by troglodytic monks hiding from persecution. In the seventeenth century, Matera was named the regional capital of Basilicata. But in 1806, Napoleon’s brother, Joseph, declared Potenza the capital. Materans were still angry about it.
Less than a century ago, some of the poorest people in the region lived in the sassi with their farm animals, but they were evacuated in the 1950s because of Carlo Levi’s book.
He had written about Matera and the poverty and disease there, the children’s eyes closed shut with trachoma, the flies crawling all over them, the levels of the sassi like Dante’s rings of hell. Because of his depiction, its residents were moved to more healthy living quarters. The sassi were called “vergogna nazionale.” A national shame.
But in the 1980s, local politicians and citizens started a movement to renovate the sassi and have families move back in. The caves were now filled with spas and hotels, luxury apartments and pizzerias, but were quiet as a graveyard.
These days, Matera was the capital of Basilicata’s movie industry. Its rocky exterior was hauntingly beautiful and was often used as a stand-in for Jerusalem and Rome in biblical films. If you saw a movie with ancient Israel as the backdrop, there was a good chance it was actually its stunt double, Matera. The walls of many restaurants were covered in autographed photos of Hollywood stars, the latest invaders to pass through the city’s eroded, shiny stone streets.
The upper reaches of Matera, above the sassi, were more typical of a modern Italian city, bustling and very sophisticated, with upscale wine shops, expensive specialty grocers, and luxury shoe stores. In those upper reaches were the archives, kept in a modern building with a red gate on a quiet side street where I had searched years ago for the murder.
But I had been looking in the wrong place.
ANTONIO’S SPOTLIGHT ILLUMINATED A SMALL CROWD OF FACES ON the amber, glowing cave walls. They greeted me as if I had arrived at some unexpected bizarre family reunion. The faces looked like mine. My faccia di Gallitelli.
The hermit monks who had painted these people in the ninth century likely modeled them on the shepherds and shepherdesses they had encountered on their less hermity days. The monks’ models were my ancestors.
I recognized the portraits of the archangels as if they were my uncles, with their wings spread mightily, and a haloed St. Peter and St. John the Baptist, whose images were slightly chipped, done in bright gold, poppy red, and vibrant blue. Staring back at me was a painting of the Blessed Mother with her baby on her lap, looking sad, as usual, maybe knowing that her son would one day die in front of her. She had high cheekbones and a long nose, like mine. Her portrait was completely intact and looked like it had been painted last week.
“You’ll see that connecting one scene to the next,” said Antonio, pointing at the wall, “are strings of blue and orange flowers that the monks painted in ochre and lapis lazuli, a motif repeated on the edges of all the stories.”
On the right side of the rocky cave mural was the main attraction—Adam and Eve, the most distressed of all the characters, with large swaths missing from their limestone faces and bodies. But you could tell they were naked, covering themselves with big blue bunches of leaves with one hand, and exchanging the forbidden fruit with the other.
A Basilicatan monk had published a dramatic poem about the fall of Adam back in the seventeenth century and I wondered if he had come here to see this cave, if its beautifully simple, elemental version of good and evil had inspired him. His name was Serafino della Salandra and somewhere along the line, the English poet John Milton either met him or stumbled upon his work while visiting Southern Italy. Milton borrowed heavily (some would say stole) from Salandra’s opus—Adamo Caduto—for his own Paradise Lost, published twenty years later.
Here in this cave paradise, Adam and Eve were very relaxed and natural looking, Eve’s breasts full and sagging, Adam’s head tilted up at the tree of knowledge, the serpent in blue and red tightly slithering up the trunk. Eve offers the stolen fig to Adam, not an apple, naturally, since this was Southern Italy—land of a billion figs.
Beneath them was the line of ochre and lapis flowers. “A symbol,” Antonio said, “of the rebirth, regeneration, and forgiveness that comes after mankind’s fall. The crypt, with its frescoes, speaks of original sin that man has committed, but it also speaks of rebirth and regeneration that follows the awareness of being wrong.”
It was as if Antonio knew all about me and my sinful family. “Thanks to error, man has the ability to grow and mature,” he explained. Without the sin, he said, there is no knowledge, no growth. No learning curve. No making things better. No forgiveness. “And that’s the intimate message that the monks were trying to send us, and have sent us, these twelve centuries later. With their flowers.”
We’re all connected, they say. One story leads to the next. One generation to the next. But we learn from our stories and our past. We learn from our sins. And we grow. Hence the tree of knowledge. We were put here on earth to have our eyes opened.
And though I could see the images, I couldn’t see that right before me was the actual key to my own family story. It was hanging right in front of my eyes, a piece of ripe fruit just waiting to be picked. It was as if Antonio, along with God and Salandra and Milton and all the angels and saints, was yelling in my ear, “Here it is. It’s the clue you’ve been looking for, right up there on the wall. Can’t you see?”
But I couldn’t see it. Not just yet.