In Italy there are numerous villages in a state of neglect, places that once teemed with life today reduced to a simple mass of ruins and weeds. Among these, a country stands out which, despite abandonment, welcomes thousands of visitors to its ruins every year: it is Craco, the Italian ghost town just 50 km from Matera. In the heart of the Lucanian badlands, located on the top of a hill of whitish rock, stands the ghost town of Craco (or at least, what remains of it). This hamlet was once known as "the land of wheat".
The production was so intense that its 2000 inhabitants were not sufficient for the cultivation of the lands, so the manpower began to arrive from Salento. Despite its very narrow and inhospitable streets, Craco was teeming with life and work. Between the 1960s and 1970s the village had to be evacuated due to a landslide that occurred in 1963. The collapse of the structures was slow, the village was in fact emptied little by little. A depopulation announced that probably with a few more precautions could be avoided.
The landslide of 1963 was not the first to hit Craco, the story of its abandonment in fact seems to have started centuries before, in 1688. In that year there was a terrible earthquake which had as its epicenter Craco-Pisticci, which caused about 400 deaths . The earthquake led to the formation of some latent landslides on a territory that was already unstable by nature...
Craco
Address: Via Sant'Angelo, 75100
Phone: 0835459005
Site:
comune.craco.mt.itLocation inserted by
Culturalword Abco