Some towns empty because of war, famine, or the slow erosion of time. Craco, in southern Italy, emptied because the ground beneath it simply gave way.
Today its medieval streets, aristocratic palazzi, and Norman tower still stand — half of them, anyway — on a hillside in Basilicata, left largely as they were when the last residents walked away more than half a century ago.
A Thousand Years on a Hill That Was Never Quite Stable
The earliest records of settlement here date to the Norman era, around the 11th century, when the tower that still defines Craco’s silhouette was built. Archaeological finds in the surrounding area suggest people lived here long before that.
Through the Middle Ages, Craco passed through the hands of several powerful feudal families of southern Italy — the Monforte, the Sforza, the Sanseverino — each leaving its mark in palaces still visible among the ruins: Palazzo Maronna, Palazzo Grossi, Palazzo Carbone and Palazzo Simonetti.
The deeper problem, though, was always underground.
Craco was built on a hill made mostly of clay and sand, ground that is naturally prone to erosion and easily shifted by groundwater.
Records show landslides as early as the second half of the 19th century, some serious enough that a retaining wall more than 10 feet thick was built to try to hold the hillside in place.
It was, in hindsight, a battle the village was always going to lose.
1963: The Year the End Began
The decisive blow came in 1963.
A landslide, caused largely by faulty water and sewer works then under construction in the area, severely damaged much of the historic center.
Authorities ordered the evacuation of the town’s roughly 1,800 residents and relocated them to two newly built settlements at the base of the hill: Craco Peschiera and Craco Sant’Angelo.
Their descendants still live there today.
The old village, however, did not die all at once.
In the years that followed, some families held on in the historic center until a flood in 1972 and, above all, the devastating Irpinia earthquake of 1980 — one of the most powerful seismic events recorded in Italy in the 20th century — drove out the last of Craco‘s residents.
From then on, the old village stood empty.
From Forgotten Village to Film Set
For decades afterward, Craco was little more than a footnote in the history of southern Italy. Just another ghost town, one of many left behind as people fled the countryside after the war.
That changed when the film industry discovered what the ruins could do.
Craco’s empty streets and half-collapsed facades served as locations for Francesco Rosi’s “Christ Stopped at Eboli” (1979), Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” (2004), and the James Bond film “Quantum of Solace” (2008), among several other international productions.
That exposure attracted a new kind of visitor, drawn by something very different from what led the village’s founders here a thousand years ago.
Visiting Craco Today
Craco is no longer a secret. It is now one of the most visited ghost towns in Italy, though access is anything but casual.
For safety reasons — the terrain remains unstable, and many of the remaining buildings could collapse — independent entry is not permitted.
Visits to the historic center are exclusively guided and require booking through the official site; visitors wear a hard hat throughout.
The museum park is open daily from April through October, generally from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. The rest of the year, it opens on weekends only, with shorter hours. Guided tours leave roughly every hour.
The tours cover the main street, what remains of the central piazza (partially sunken after the landslide), and several side alleys — roughly a third of the original village in total.
Admission runs around 16 euros and includes access to the Museo Emozionale di Craco, an audiovisual space designed to put the site’s history in context before or after the walk through the ruins.
Craco sits about 37 miles — a little over an hour’s drive along the SS7 state road — from Matera, the UNESCO World Heritage city famous for its ancient Sassi cave dwellings.
There is no public transportation to the village. Most visitors arrive by car, organized tour, or private transfer from Matera, which makes an easy base for seeing both in a single day.
A Village That Is Still, Literally, Falling Apart
Unlike many historic ruins, which have long since stabilized, Craco is still changing.
The same geological forces that emptied it six decades ago continue, more slowly now, to wear away what is left of its buildings.
That may be the most unsettling thing about visiting. This is not a ruin frozen in time. It is a village that, with each passing season, keeps losing a little more of itself to the force that once drove everyone away.
