The fall of a new meteorite is always a very exciting and unexpected event. They can land anywhere and do! The places that they pitch up in can sometimes be a little on the dull side. I am not sure Felix, Alabama is a wild and crazy tourist hotspot but it is a great meteorite all the same. But sometimes, meteorites do land in exotic and spectacular places and that is the case for Matera, the Valentine’s Day meteorite. On 14 February 2023 at about 7pm (UTC) a bright fireball appeared in the skies over southern Italy. It was picked up by three dedicated all-Sky cameras of the Italian PRISMA fireball network. There were many other sightings of fireball as well. Calculations suggest it was moving at 16.5 km per second, that’s about 37,000 miles per hour! The fireball first became visible at a height of 86 km and the angle of the fireball with the horizontal was about 60 degrees. Following these exciting events, an intense search campaign was conducted with members of the public asked to look out for space rocks. Three days after the fall some fragments were located on the balcony of a house and more pieces were recovered in the following days. A total of 117.5g has now been found. It’s not huge amount of material, but it is still more than enough for scientists to analyse.

And what about the place where the meteorite landed? The fragments of the meteorite were recovered close to the town of Matera. It is a well known spot. Without realising it, you may already be familiar with it. It was the principal filming location of Mel Gibson’s 2004 film The Passion of Christ where it doubled as biblical Jerusalem. It also featured significantly in the Bond film No Time to Die. That crazy car chase through the streets of a rustic hilltop Italian town. That was Matera. During a family holiday in southern Italy I once visited Matera. It was an extraordinary place, with steep, narrow streets lined with ancient houses dug out of the limestone rock. It really did look and feel like something from ancient times.

And what about the meteorite itself. On one level it is a common type known as an ordinary chondrite. And due to its high iron and metal content it is classified within the subdivision known as H chondrites. The Meteoritical Bulletin lists 406 other observed H chondrite falls, which is quite a lot. This means that Matera is not a unique sample. But it does show some unusual features. It has a relatively low density for an ordinary chondrite and a high porosity. It may once have been part of the rubble layer close to the surface of its parent asteroid. It was later eject into space as a relatively small object with a radius of a few tens of centimetres.

Earlier this week a detailed scientific paper on the Matera meteorite was published in the journal Meteoritics and Planetary Science. The lead author of the paper is Professor Giovanni Pratesi of the University of Firenze. The team involved in the study was large and included myself and colleagues at the Open University. Like all quickly recovered samples Matera is fresh and relatively uncontaminated by material from the Earth. That makes it scientifically valuable. But as a space rock that landed in such a beautiful spot it has a little bit more style than usual. And arriving on 14 February makes it a very romantic shooting star.

Some images of the Matera meteorite showing its crumbly porous texture. The fragment bottom right shows fusion crust which formed as it came through Earth’s atmosphere. Each fragment is about 1 cm in diameter (Image: Pratesi et al. 2025)