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You may well have a sense of déjà-vu when you enter Matera, a place that seems at once both truly exotic, oddly familiar and a little eerie. Spread over a valley in Basilicata, the town is stark, called “la città sotterranea” ("the underground city") for the vast number of hillside cave dwellings from the Paleolithic period in which, off on and on...

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If you visit the southern Italian city of Matera this month, you may be lucky enough to catch a glimpse of Mr James Bond himself. Daniel Craig and company will be filming the latest 007 movie in the ancient city of caves, which was also the backdrop to the Amazonian island of Themyscira in Wonder Woman (2017). It is not hard to understand Hollywood...

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Rocco Petrone, the immigrant son of a couple from the town of Sasso Castalda, near Potenza, was the engineer monitoring the countdown on July 16, 1969 for the launch of the Apollo 11 spacecraft in Cape Canaveral that would take two men to the moon for the first time, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. A mechanic engineer, he was the director of launch...

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Matera rises up on both sides of a deep ravine, its houses carved out of pale limestone, one piled on top of the other, forming a dazzling beehive of humanity. Known as the ‘City of Stones’, Matera was one of Italy’s first settlements, said to be the third-oldest continually inhabited city in the world, and its layers reveal Palaeolithic, Gothic, B...

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The Apollo 11 moon landing was 50 years ago, but the images of humans walking on the powdery lunar surface, the earth rising behind them, are every bit as awe-inspiring today as they were in 1969. In Matera, the city in Southern Italy that’s the 2019 European Capital of Culture, this powerful moment will come to life with the Apollo Soundtrack, a m...

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For the 73rd time in their history, Italy and Italians celebrated the Festa della Repubblica, with events across the globe aiming to underline the relevance of what happened in the country in 1946. June 2nd became a public holiday only in 2000 though, when Italian President of the Republic, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, decided to make a National Day of ce...

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Nel pomeriggio del 4 giugno all’Ames Research Center della Nasa di Mountain View in California si è tenuto un convegno volto a rafforzare la cooperazione nel settore dello spazio tra Italia e Stati Uniti e a celebrare nell’occasione il ruolo di Matera, sia come Capitale Europea della Cultura sia quale città strategica delle tecnologie spaziali ital...

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Shot in Matera. A Film Retrospective Celebrating Matera. 2019 European Capital of Culture. Free Admission | RSVP Required. IIC SF: 601 Van Ness Ave, Suite F (Opera Plaza), San Francisco (CA); BAMPFA, 2155 Center Street, Berkeley (CA) Jun 23, Jul 5, Aug 8 | IIC SF - CHRIST STOPPED AT EBOLI - Dir. Francesco Rosi - Bay Area Premiere Full-Length Digita...

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Join us for the Opening Reception of the photo exhibit Probable Landscapes (Paesaggi Probabili), by Nico Colucci. For the occasion, harpist Giuliana De Donno and composer and cellist Vito Paternosterwill join us in celebrating Matera, European Capital of Culture 2019. Part of the celebration is the film retrospective Shot in Matera (details will be...

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The choice of Matera as 2019’s European City of Culture will have astonished Italians of a certain age, although not those who have ever visited it. Fifty years ago, the city was designated the ‘national shame’ of Italy, embodying everything that was wrong with the impoverished south. But it was not true then and is little more than a hazy memory t...

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