Matera signs agreement with Saudi city of Al-'Ula: mutual promotion goal

Pact between two ancient cities carved in stone: Italy’s Matera and Saudi Arabia’s Al-’Ula enter into an agreement to promote conservation, prosperity and sustainability. Yesterday the Royal Commission for Al-’Ula (RCU) and the city of Matera signed a collaboration that activates a twinning program with the aim of protecting and promoting cultural heritage. Al-’Ula and Matera will work together to promote each other, organize cultural exchanges, create initiatives together and exchange knowledge in multiple areas of collaboration.

The signing ceremony, which was held among the Sassi of Matera, comes 30 years after UNESCO listed the southern Italian city’s typical inhabited caves as a World Heritage Site. Similarly, Hegra, the 2,000-year-old ancient Nabataean city located about 20 km from Al-’Ula, famous for its funerary monuments carved out of sandstone, is now a protected archaeological site, named 15 years ago as Saudi Arabia’s first UNESCO World Heritage site.

Under the new agreement, Royal Commission for Al-’Ula and Matera will collaborate on the promotion and organization of cultural initiatives centered on a number of common axes, which will encourage cultural, educational, economic and social exchanges between the two destinations.

Traces of 200,000 years of human history can be found in Al-’Ula, and archaeologists suggest the presence of civilizations that have followed one another since 7,000 years ago. Al-’Ula was the seat of the Dadanite, Lihyanite and Nabataean kingdoms before being annexed to the Roman Empire in 106. The four main sites of the ancient desert city include Jabal Ikmah, a mountain covered with ancient rock carvings and petroglyphs, also known as “the open-air library,” also inscribeditself a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the Old Town of Al-’Ula, a 12th-century village built alongside the lush oasis, characterized by a maze of houses built of mud brick and stone with a 10th-century fort at its center. Matera, too, has an unbroken history of civilization, dating back to the Paleolithic (10th millennium B.C.) known for its famous urban center carved into the rock along twin slopes known as the Sassi. On this basis, the agreement between the two cities was born.

The partnership between Al-’Ula and Matera is part of a broader agreement between Al-’Ula and Italy that has seen initiatives such as the Saudi Village, a five-day cultural event that took place last September in Villa Borghese, Rome, a collaboration with the photographic exhibition curated by Cortona on the Move that was held during the Al-’Ula Arts Festival 2022 and the training of young Saudi scholars in cultural heritage conservation at the La Venaria Reale Conservation and Restoration Center near Turin, Italy.

In Venice in May 2023, Saudi Arabia and Italy signed an agreement to promote collaboration in the fields of archaeology, conservation, restoration and protection of cultural heritage, film and literature, which came into effect in November of that year. Signing the agreement were Saudi Minister of Culture and Governor of RCU, Badr bin Abdullah bin Farhan Al Saud, and his Italian counterpart Gennaro Sangiuliano.

This initiative is part of Al-’Ula’s comprehensive strategy aimed at linking actors who

Waleed Al Dayel, Chief Strategy and Digital Officer of RCU, commented, “The agreement with Matera supports our efforts to create an international destination that benefits the local community, economy and environment of Al-’Ula, while offering the residents of the two cities the opportunity to meet different cultures, forge personal bonds and explore common challenges and opportunities. The partnership will redefine how the two cities connect culture lovers with history and heritage as we continue in parallel to share Saudi Arabia’s culture with the world and discover the importance of the Arabian Peninsula in human history.”

Tiziana D’Oppido, Councillor for Culture, Tourism, Events, UNESCO Heritage Sassi, and Equal Opportunities of the Municipality of Matera, said, “The exact date of the 30th anniversary since Matera became a World Heritage Site provided the best possible setting to highlight the twinning agreement signed between the Royal Commission for Al-’Ula and the Municipality of Matera. Ambitious, operational and rich is the planned calendar of activities that we will carry out in synergy, with great, mutual collaborative spirit and in compliance with the sustainability objectives of the two destinations in the preservation of their respective UNESCO sites: culture as an engine of the economy, tourism, cinema, events, design, arts, archaeology, architecture, accessibility, Sassi as a successful urban ecosystem and much more for two realities geographically distant but having many elements in common. Matera, European Capital of Culture in 2019, is a case study for the ability to recover the value of a city that the world has long neglected and that risked being abandoned and forgotten by history, just like Al-’Ula becoming instead, both of them, land of redemption and virtuous examples to follow.”

Pictured: one of Hegra’s monuments.

Matera signs agreement with Saudi city of Al-'Ula: mutual promotion goal

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