IT WAS once described by an Italian prime minister as a national disgrace, better known for its goat-herding peasants and lack of running water than a place of pilgrimage. But now one of Italy’s poorest regions is set to become the latest holiday destination on the tourist map.
As Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ opened across Italy this week, where it is expected to break box office records, a small town in the country’s Basilicata region is whipping up plates of "fettuccine alla Mel", in preparation for the Eas
ter weekend tourist onslaught.
For two months last year, Gibson and his company set up shop in Matera, filming the graphic sequences of Christ’s last hours, the bloody scenes of his torture and his crucifixion.
The resulting film took a record-breaking £2 million on its first weekend of release in Britain, and now there are hopes to turn the location into a tourist destination.
Passion tour packages by travel agencies have sparked interest among visitors from the United States, while Holy Week tourists from Germany, France and Norway as well as Italy strolled Matera’s narrow streets and up the hill where Jim Caviezel, the American actor who played Jesus, struggled under the cross.
Along with its famous sassi - the caves dug into the rock that gives Matera the look of ancient Jerusalem - the town now has the film’s backdrop to offer to tourists on package tours, along with the scores of locals who worked as extras.
Everyone in the town seems to have a Mel Gibson story, anecdotes about cast members or friends who were chosen to feature in the movie.
One young man who said he played a Roman soldier pointed out to anyone who would listen where highlights were filmed.
"One morning I saw Gibson walking and said ‘Ciao Mel’," gushed Anna Calia, who put up Caviezel in her residence in the sassi for the entire shooting. "He stopped and shook my hand."
Rosalia Giura Longo, who runs the Italia hotel and whose photo with Gibson hangs in the lobby alongside a ‘thank you’ note he wrote her, said: "We are off the beaten path, I don’t have too many illusions.
"But this year it looks like things are moving."
Matera is not new to the Passion business, however. The Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini shot his The Gospel According to St Matthew there in 1964, clearly struck by the same scenery that attracted Gibson.
In fact, the cave houses dug out of tufa have been on the UN World Heritage List for a decade, but the town suffers from isolation.
It’s some 150 miles east of Naples, far from the sea, an airport or super-highway, and served only by a one-track rail line to Bari on the Adriatic coast.
"It’s not yet a boom, but business is picking up," said Maria Laura Isola, as she stood in front of her tiny Sassi Tourism office.
Tourists flocking to visit the place where their favourite movies were filmed is not a new phenomenon.
After the success of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres’ novel set in Kefalonia, the Greek island saw its summer population swell from 35,000 to more than 100,000.
New Zealand’s South Island is enjoying a huge resurgence in visitors after playing the backdrop to The Lord of the Rings, and Provence became the haunt of middle-class families in the Eighties after Peter Mayle’s bestseller A Year in Provence.
But sometimes the allure of Hollywood is not needed when a holiday trip is being planned. Dag Klaastad, a visitor from Oslo, said he hadn’t been aware that Gibson’s Passion had been filmed in Matera until he arrived. The Norwegian said he was actually drawn by the book Christ Stopped at Eboli, written during the author’s exile to the region during fascism, and a testament to the forlorn south of Italy.
