Matera, a town in Basilicata almost in the heel of Italy's boot, wears its old age very well. It has appeared in films such as The Passion of the Christ (2004), Ben Hur (2015), and Mary Magdalene (2018). Its Sassi – literally the Stones, or the cave dwellings where people lived since the Paleolithic period – were designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1993 and described by the organisation as the ‘most outstanding, intact example of troglodyte settlement in the Mediterranean region’. As a result, the Sassi were transformed from slums into a cultural treasure to be protected and conserved. A process of urban regeneration followed, and Matera started to become a popular destination. Today, about 400,000 tourists visit the town each year, drawn by its history, landscapes, and novelty. It was designated a European Cultural Capital for 2019.

These are certainly lofty accomplishments, as not long ago Italy wanted to use its boot to kick Matera off the map. At the end of the Second World War Matera and its Sassi, which still housed an estimated 15,000 people, were dubbed a national embarrassment by politicians, intellectuals, and journalists. People living in the Sassi shared spaces with chickens, donkeys, and other animals. Iron pots under the bed were used as toilets. There was no running water, no drainage, and no electricity. Malaria was rampant, and infant mortality surged to 40 per cent. It was all poverty and misery – and the squalor was only mitigated by a sense of solidarity between families.

Following political and media pressure, the Christian Democrats (DC) passed special legislation in 1952 aiming to rehouse the dwellers of the Sassi in residential quarters or rural villages. Intellectuals, architects, anthropologists, and ethnographers – Italians and non-Italians – came to Matera to contribute to the building work, which transformed the city into a testing ground for postwar town planning theories, and for the DC's effort to tackle the question of the Mezzogiorno. The rehousing plan, however, met innumerable problems and was never completed, while the Sassi became a ghost town used as an illegal rubbish dump.

With Matera, 1945–1960: The History of a ‘National Disgrace’, Patrick McGauley sets out to explore how and why Matera came to be viewed as the shame of the nation and a powerful emblem of the Southern Question, as well as to investigate the impact of these narratives on the social and urban development of the city. The author uses Matera as a laboratory for testing the contested and contrasting notions of nationhood that emerged in the context of the Cold War. Thus, he shows how narratives of Matera and its cave dwellings were used by dominant political forces of the time, Catholics and communists, to forge their own visions of the Italian nation following over 20 years of Fascist rule and the war.

The book is divided into four loosely chronological chapters that, taken together, offer a fresh look at the Southern Question and at the discourse on the nation in postwar Italy. Chapter One examines the description of Matera in Carlo Levi's Christ Stopped at Eboli. This book, McGauley explains, not only played a crucial role in the rediscovery of the Southern Question in post-Fascist Italy, but also shaped the subsequent accounts of Matera and its cave dwellings, exposing to the progressive world a peasant lifestyle perceived by modern standards as ‘backward’ and ‘primitive’. Chapter Two charts how Christian Democrats and communists – through a narrative construction that linked housing conditions and morality – forged the image of Matera as a national disgrace. This is perhaps the most interesting chapter, as it eschews normative ideas of nationhood and focuses instead on the emotional expression through which the nation was both imagined and made. Chapter Three investigates the impact that the notions of Matera as a national disgrace had on its social and urban fabric, and on the implementation of the first special law for the Sassi in the 1950s. This chapter is especially remarkable because in order to reassess the rehousing programme and its limitations the author examines in detail previously neglected sources from Matera's state archive, including the files of local prefects and the office of public works. Chapter Four is a case study of La Martella, a rural village built to rehouse 200 families from the Sassi. It shows how and why the Christian Democrats used this project to promote social and economic reforms for the South and to turn the Mezzogiorno, as a political poster of the time said, into the California of Italy. Here, as in Chapter Three, McGauley correctly foregrounds the complexities of Italian politics and rejects an oversimplified Manichean view – still too common in Anglo-Saxon scholarship – that casts Christian Democracy as the villain of the story. Yet he does not take account of the fact that, in addition to political and electoral motives, Catholic politics in postwar Italy remained intensively motivated by ‘spiritual’ concerns. Spirituality here needs to be understood not as an intimate essence but rather as a combination of culture, lived experience, and mentality – a Weberian Weltbild that concretely came to shape socio-economic policies. For Christian Democrats, spirituality meant to respond to the call of the Gospel in favour of the poor southerners. They were existentially committed to translate the ethos of the Gospel into a guiding device for a reconstructed community. These considerations might have helped McGauley to frame better the tears of prime minister De Gasperi following his first visit to Matera in 1950 (Chapter Two), and might have strengthened the basis of his general arguments.

There is a long list of books and articles in Italian published on Matera and the Sassi from diverse disciplinary perspectives. The scholarship in English is more limited. McGauley, however, is the first to examine the large body of emotional expressions generated in relation to Matera as a ‘national disgrace’ and their intersection with the notions of nationhood that emerged after the Second World War. He engages with the new southern history; but rather rather than reducing the complexities of the Southern Question to a unified ethnocentric discourse, he approaches it as a contested and fractured idea. Thus, McGauley historicises the Southern Question, explaining how and why a specific image of the South came to be seen as convincing and was influential at the political, intellectual, and popular level.

Matera, 1945–1960 is beautifully written. The range of primary sources examined, often previously neglected, is impressive. These include documents from archives in Italy and in the US, newspapers and magazines, parliamentary documents and debates, and official newsreels and documentary footage. The book skilfully draws on methods from the history of nationalism, the history of emotion, the new southern history, and urban history. Interviews, ethnographic research and oral history would have enriched the book enormously. The author, in fact, is aware of this limitation and only financial and temporal constraints prevented him including the voices of the Sassi dwellers – with the exception of a number of existing oral sources sometimes filtered through official documents and party press – in his historical narrative. His work, however, blazes the trail for future research on the history of postwar Matera from below and constitutes an indispensable reference for a renewed southern history.