How Craco Became Italy's Most Famous Ghost Town, and Why It Was Abandoned
A medieval town on a 1,300-foot cliff in southern Italy emptied out over three decades. Hollywood has been using it as a film set ever since.
A landslide didn’t just damage buildings in Craco, Italy, it basically kicked the whole town off its cliff-edge perch. One minute people were living on that steep clay hill in the calanchi badlands, snapping photos of medieval stone silhouettes against the valley, and the next minute the ground started behaving like it had a mind of its own.
Craco sat in Basilicata, about 40 km inland from the Gulf of Taranto, and roughly 50 km from Matera, with centuries of Greek, Norman, and medieval life built right into the rock. By the time the town finally got hit with disaster, it was already bleeding residents, over 1,300 leaving for the United States in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Then came 1963, when a landslide tore through parts of the town, followed by a 1972 flood that made any return to the old areas feel impossible.
It’s a slow fade, then a fast exit, and the story of Craco is basically what happens when a place can’t recover fast enough.
Where Craco Sits in Italy
Craco is in the Basilicata region of southern Italy, about 40 km inland from the Gulf of Taranto and roughly 50 km from Matera. The whole town sits on top of a steep clay hill in landscape locals call calanchi, eroded badlands that look more like the American Southwest than the Italian countryside.
The cliff rises 400 meters (around 1,300 feet) above the valley floor, and the medieval architecture is built straight into the rock at the top, which is what gives photographs of the town that distinctive cliff-edge silhouette.
People have been there a long time. Archaeological evidence puts the first settlers at the 8th century BC, when Greek sailors from the Mediterranean coast moved inland and put roots down on the hill, according to All That's Interesting.
By the medieval period, Craco was a serious town: a monastic center, a feudal seat, a university, a castle, and several churches. The Torre Normanna at the highest point dates to the Norman era.
The patron saint is San Vincenzo. For most of its long history, this was a place people actively chose to live. That changed slowly, then very fast.
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How Craco Italy Was Slowly Emptied
The decline started before any disaster. Between the late 19th century and the early 20th, more than 1,300 Craco residents left for the United States, driven out by the same southern Italian poverty that emptied so many villages in the same era. The town was already shrinking by the time the trouble began.
The first big rupture came in 1963. A landslide tore through part of the town, almost certainly triggered by infrastructure work that had recently been done on water and sewer lines, per Wine and Travel Italy. The hill Craco sits on is clay. Disturbing the water table on a clay hill is a bad idea.
Authorities began evacuating residents to temporary housing. In 1972, a flood hit. That ruined any realistic plan for moving people back into the older parts of town. Many residents had spent nearly a decade in tent cities by then, waiting on a government promise that kept not materializing.
In 1980, the Irpinia earthquake struck the wider region. That was the final break. Craco was declared uninhabitable and abandoned outright.
The strange thing is that the buildings mostly stayed. The town wasn't destroyed. It was emptied. The displaced families moved down to a new settlement in the valley called Craco Peschiera, and the old town just sat there on its cliff, locked behind chains, weathering one season at a time.
Other places across Europe and beyond have similar abandoned-but-intact stories. Photographers have documented forgotten Italian institutions from the same era, like the old asylums in the north, and the diamond mining town of Kolmanskop in Namibia got swallowed by desert sand after its industry collapsed. Craco's emptying was slower, but the result is recognizable.
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Before the 1963 landslide, Craco was already losing people, with more than 1,300 residents heading to the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Then the 1963 rupture hit, when a landslide tore through the town and forced evacuations to temporary housing.
The clay hill and the water and sewer lines made it worse, because messing with the water table on calanchi terrain is a recipe for more trouble.
By 1972, the flood finished the job, leaving families stuck in near-decade tent cities and making a comeback to the older parts of town feel out of reach.
Inside the Craco Ghost Town Today
You can visit. Sort of. Public access has been restricted since the early 2010s for safety reasons. Most of the homes are still privately owned by the families that left, which adds a legal layer to the practical one. Guided tours run from a small visitor center, and entry is through a locked gate with hard hats handed out at the door.
What's inside has held up surprisingly well. The bakery's ovens are still there. Some homes have furniture, kitchenware, and personal items left where they were dropped during the rushed evacuations. Frescoes survive in a few of the older religious buildings. Other rooms were gutted by theft during the years before the chain-link fence went up.
Preservation has caught up since then. The Craco Society, founded in 2007 by descendants of the displaced, works to maintain the history and connect diaspora families with records of who lived where. The town was added to the World Monuments Fund's Watch List in 2010, which helped attract restoration funding.
Hollywood found Craco before the conservation funding did. Mel Gibson shot the Judas hanging scene from The Passion of the Christ in the village, the James Bond film Quantum of Solace used Craco for parts of its Italian sequences, and several smaller productions including Saving Grace have featured the cliff in their establishing shots. The visual is too good to ignore. A fully built medieval town on a cliff with nobody in it doesn't come up often.
That same eerie quality belongs to a handful of other depopulated places. The lagoon-island of Poveglia outside Venice emptied for its own grim plague-and-asylum reasons, and the contaminated soil of France's Zone Rouge remains closed nearly a century after WWI made it too dangerous to farm. Craco's story is gentler in comparison. No plague, no war, no chemical weapons. Just bad geology and worse luck.
The new town in the valley is where everyone with a Craco surname actually lives now. The old one stays where it is, on top of the cliff, looking the way it did when everyone left.
Other places with abandoned histories sit higher up still. The Cappadocian region of Turkey hides the underground refuge city of Derinkuyu, carved 18 levels straight down into volcanic rock and forgotten for centuries before a homeowner accidentally found the tunnel behind his basement wall in 1963.
Craco didn’t just get abandoned, it got outpaced by the damage.
Still think Craco’s empty streets are eerie? Read how Poveglia’s island was used, for suffering, not ghosts.
