When the southern Italian city of Matera found out it had been selected as the 2019 European capital of culture, its ancient streets echoed with cheers. Thousands gathered in October 2014 to watch the announcement live from Brussels in a central piazza. “It reminded me of the day when Napoli announced it had acquired Diego Maradona,” said Daniele Kihlgren, an Italian-Swedish businessman who has invested in a hotel in Matera. “The same uproar was heard throughout the town.”

But the euphoria was quickly replaced by a sense of anxiety. “After the celebrations,” said Eustachio Nicoletti, Matera’s secretary for Italy’s largest labour union, the CGIL, “people began to wonder, ‘and what the hell are we going to do now?’”

Today, with little over three months remaining until 2019, that concern has become a real fear that the city’s big opportunity could instead be a colossal failure. Local organisations and business owners are warning that the city will simply not be ready. Rome and Brussels secured €400m (£360m) to organise the year’s events, money that was supposed to pay for restoring buildings and repairing streets in a place famed for its stunning but dilapidated beauty and history of dire poverty.

But, according to the unions, most of the money is still trapped in the labyrinth of Italian bureaucracy and has not yet been spent.

“Of the seven buildings that should have housed the cultural events, at least five will not be ready in time for 2019,” said Nicoletti.

Concern also surrounds accessibility: half of the funding, about €200m, had been allocated for the construction of a new railway line. The station is there – it was built in 1986 – but there is no railway. Matera can still be reached only by a slow, secondary rail line from Bari, which takes nearly two hours to cover 60km, while work to complete the Bradanica highway, connecting the city with the north of the Basilicata region, began almost 40 years ago and has yet to be completed.

“The truth is that the disregard for not meeting deadlines was already well known in 2014,” said Enzo Acito, former director of tourism for Matera. “Everyone knew that with the snail’s pace of Italian bureaucracy and the typical waiting times for the construction industry in Italy, the facilities would never be completed by 2019.”

Matera was the first southern Italian city to be recognised as a European capital of culture. But, like many towns across the region, it bears the wounds of structural deficiencies, such as high youth unemployment, alleged corruption and obscure political manoeuvrings. In July the president of the Basilicata region, Marcello Pittella, was placed under house arrest by prosecutors in Matera for alleged involvement in rigging healthcare contracts. He denies all the accusations against him.

Such problems, often chronic in the south of Italy, are exacerbated by historic and deeply rooted difficulties in a town which was virtually abandoned for more than 40 years after the second world war. Cut off from the modern economy, Matera was one of Europe’s poorest cities, where families lived in grottoes, the “Sassi” (literally stones) carved out of the limestone that dated back to Matera’s prehistoric era.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Many construction projects are still unfinished and time is running out. Photograph: CGIL,Matera

The extent of the squalid conditions in the Sassi only came to international attention when writer Carlo Levi was exiled by Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime to a town close to Matera in 1935. In his book, Christ Stopped at Eboli, published in 1945, Levi described the horror he witnessed – the paltry furniture, children either naked or in rags, bodies ravaged by disease – and concluded: “I have never seen in all my life such a picture of poverty.”

In 1952 Italy’s prime minister, Alcide De Gasperi proclaimed a state of emergency in Matera, described by Rome as “a national disgrace”. The inhabitants of the Sassi were eventually evacuated and relocated a few kilometres away. Matera would remain deserted and silent until 1993 when Unesco declared the Sassi, once a source of national shame and a symbol of poverty and disease, a world heritage site, following a long list of achievements that eventually led to its selection, along with Plovdiv in Bulgaria, as a 2019 European capital of culture.

But Matera’s fate after next year is an open question. “It’s the fear that we all share at this time,” said Nicoletti. “When it’s all over – the firework display, the cultural events and the attention – what will be Matera’s fate?”

Paolo Verri, director of the Matera-Basilicata 2019 Foundation in charge of the organisation of the cultural events, shrugs off any blame and insists the year of culture will go ahead. “We will carry out the events as we have planned,” he said. “We can’t control infrastructure. It’s not our responsibility. What I can say is that in the past few years we have quadrupled the number of visitors in Matera and, at the end of the event, it will always be in the spotlight.”

Nicoletti has a different view. In 2017, the CGIL published a report – entitled Matera 2019: missed opportunity? – in which researchers tried to analyse the city’s future after the event. The conclusions seem anything but rosy.

“The risk is that the facilities slated for completion by 2019 won’t even be ready by 2020,” said Nicoletti. “The risk is that the city will have lost an opportunity to create jobs for its people, who each year emigrate toward northern Italy. The risk is to have missed a train that won’t be coming back.”