Italy · Basilicata
Matera
One of the longest continuously inhabited places on earth, emptied by decree as a national disgrace within living memory, and now the most astonishing skyline in southern Italy.
Matera is a town of caves cut into a limestone ravine in Basilicata, less built than excavated: house on house, one roof serving as the next one's street. People have lived here unbroken since prehistory, making the two cave quarters, the Sassi, one of the oldest inhabited landscapes anywhere and, with families sharing a rock room with the mule, a national scandal. The state emptied them by law in the 1950s, left them derelict a generation, then paid to bring them back: the quarter Italy was ashamed of is now a World Heritage site of hotels and museums, glowing across the gorge at dusk.
Suggested stay
2–3 days
Language
Italian
Currency
EUR
Timezone
UTC+2
Why you'll love Matera
The Sassi two amphitheatres of cave dwellings poured down a ravine, where the roof of one house is the street of the next and the town is quarried out of the ground it stands on.
The turnaround within one lifetime this was Italy's national shame, emptied by decree and left to rot, and the honest, uncomfortable, very well told story of how it came back is the best thing here after the view itself.
Sleeping in the thing itself the restored caves are now rooms, so you spend the night inside the vaulted rock you came to look at, cool and quiet and lit like a chapel, which almost nowhere else in Europe can offer.
The far bank across the gorge lies empty pasture, rock churches and hawks, so you look out from town at wilderness and back at a lit stone city barely changed in a thousand years.
Best time to visit
Mar-Nov
14-31° days
40.666° N, 16.605° E
UTC+2 · Europe/Rome
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Weather & when to go to Matera
Month by month: typical highs and lows, rainfall and rain days.
✓ Best Mar-Nov
Cards tinted by calculated verdict · big number = typical daily high, small = low · hover for conditions
When to avoid Matera
No month is a write-off here, only the wrong hour: the town is bare pale rock with almost no shade, so summer afternoons are punishing and also the busiest, which makes early morning and the hour around sunset the point of being here. The coldest months are short on daylight and turn raw when wind funnels up the gorge, the trade for having the cave quarters close to empty.
Top things to do in Matera
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Casa Grotta di Vico Solitario - the cave house left exactly as it was emptied
history 👍 PopularOne rock room furnished as lived in until the evacuation: the high bed with the smallest children in a drawer beneath it, the mule's stall in the same wall, the cistern hole underfoot, one window for a family of ten. The fittings came out of real houses; the notes are blunt about malaria and infant mortality. Ten minutes explains what the town takes two days to say; come early.
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Santa Maria de Idris and San Giovanni in Monterrone - a church inside a rock
history culture arts 👍 PopularThe Monterrone, a bare limestone cone in Sasso Caveoso, holds a church hollowed into it, with a tunnel through to a second church layered with frescoed saints, some Byzantine in feel, painted and repainted by monks, then villagers. The rock sweats, so the paint has suffered and lighting is low. The terrace outside is among the best perches in town, the lower sasso dropping away and the gorge opening beyond.
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Casa Noha - the film that tells you what you are looking at
history culture arts ⭐ Highly recommendedA noble house held by the national heritage trust, stripped to bare rooms, where a projection across the raw walls narrates the town's whole arc: the water engineering, the crowding, the shame, the evacuation, the emptiness, the return. It is unsentimental about poverty and pointed about what the tourism boom does and does not fix. Half an hour, and the Sassi stop being a backdrop. Best on your first morning.
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Palombaro Lungo - the cistern the size of a church under the main square
historyMatera exists because it learned to catch water on a dry plateau, and the proof sits under the main square: a vaulted cistern hacked from the rock, deep enough to swallow a small basilica, plastered watertight and fed from the streets above. Rediscovered when the square was repaved in the 1990s, it is entered on a gangway, the old water line visible. Every cave house had a smaller version underfoot.
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Cattedrale di Matera - the Romanesque cathedral on the Civita
history culture artsThe cathedral crowns the spur between the two sassi, a tall bell tower and wheel window in 13th century Apulian Romanesque, from when Matera wanted to look like a Puglian city, not a warren of caves. The inside was baroqued over, then reopened in 2016 with medieval frescoes under the plaster, a carved stone nativity and a Byzantine Madonna found behind an altar. The terrace behind takes in both quarters.
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San Pietro Barisano - the biggest rock church in town, and the crypt below it
historyFrom the lane it looks like a normal church, then keeps going back into the hillside: the largest of Matera's rupestrian churches, cool, damp, bare, its frescoes cut off the walls and sold while the Sassi stood abandoned. Below the nave are the drainage niches where clergy were seated to decompose before burial. The emptiness is the point: this is what all of the Sassi looked like for thirty years.
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Belvedere di Murgia Timone - the view of Matera from the far side of the gorge
scenic 👍 PopularCross to the Murgia plateau and the town reads as one object: a bowl of terraces around the cathedral spur, the ravine dropping away. This is the famous angle, the one that stands in for Jerusalem on film. It is twenty minutes by road around the gorge head, or a walk down and up the far side. Come for the last light and stay as the caves glow.
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Parco della Murgia Materana - the rock churches on the empty bank
nature wildlife history hikingAcross the gorge, a wind-scoured plateau holds well over a hundred rock churches cut by Byzantine-rite monks, some with frescoed apses legible, plus neolithic ring ditches and shepherds' shelters used into living memory. Paths drop from Sasso Caveoso to the stream and up the far slope, rough underfoot, exposed and unshaded: bring boots and water, start early, not midday. A guide turns empty hillside into a landscape you can read.
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Cripta del Peccato Originale - the Sistine chapel of the rock churches
history culture arts ⭐ Highly recommendedA shepherd's cave outside town on the old Appian road, its back wall carrying a 9th century Genesis and archangel cycle by an unknown hand called the Painter of the Flowers of Matera, for the poppies scattered between the scenes. The colour startles after the worn saints in town; it survived by being forgotten. Visits are guided, small and by booking only at set times, so organise it in advance.
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MUSMA - contemporary sculpture in the caves of a palazzo
culture artsA sculpture museum in a Sasso Caveoso noble house whose lower rooms are hypogea, so the work stands in vaulted caverns, tool marks still on the ceilings. The collection runs from the late 19th century on, heavy on Italian names, but the building does half the work: bronze in a cave lit by one shaft is not the same piece. Also the coolest place in town on a hot afternoon.
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Palazzo Lanfranchi - Carlo Levi's Lucania panorama
culture arts historyThe 17th century seminary palace above the old town holds the regional art museum, whose centrepiece is the enormous panel Carlo Levi painted for a national exhibition: a continuous frieze of Basilicata peasant life, a village funeral, faces he knew in exile. His book is why the world learned what the Sassi were, so seeing it minutes from the caves closes a loop. Upstairs, southern religious painting and local collections.
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Madonna delle Virtu and San Nicola dei Greci - two rock churches on one terrace
history culture artsA double complex above Sasso Barisano: a lower rock-cut church with rib-vaulted ceilings imitating built architecture, and a smaller one above with fragmentary frescoes, both facing the gorge. Greek-rite monks used them, a reminder that this was a border zone between Latin and Byzantine Christianity. The larger space is often hung with art shows, and the terrace outside is a good sunset perch when the belvedere feels too far.
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Pane di Matera and the cucina povera table
foodThe bread is protected and an obsession: durum wheat, natural leaven, wood ovens, horned loaves that keep a week, as a peasant economy needed. Around it, the food of scarcity: peperoni cruschi, dried sweet peppers fried until they shatter, over pasta or salt cod; crapiata, a bean and grain soup; cialledda, stale bread revived with tomato and oil; hand-dragged strascinati; wild lampascioni bulbs. Drink Aglianico from the volcano west.
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The Sassi after dark - the lit town from the balconies
scenicMatera's best hour is after the coaches go, when the heat lifts off the stone and thousands of small lights come on across both quarters. Walk the balcony street above Sasso Barisano and the belvedere beside the palace museum, then drop into the lanes, where the only sounds are footsteps and cutlery and you lose your bearings. Take a phone torch: some flights are unlit and the stone is slick.
Best areas to stay in Matera
$ Budget $$ Mid-range $$$ Premium
Sasso Barisano
First-time visitors $$Restored caves, hotels and lit lanes
Explore hotels in Sasso Barisano →
Sasso Caveoso
Atmosphere first $$Older, rougher, more open cave quarter
Explore hotels in Sasso Caveoso →
Civita
Quiet and central $$$Cathedral spur between the two sassi
Explore hotels in Civita →
Il Piano
Easy access and value $Flat nineteenth century town above the caves
Explore hotels in Il Piano →
Live nightly prices from Booking.com, Agoda and others, centred on Matera
Getting to & around Matera
Getting there
Fly into Bari and take a direct coach up onto the plateau in a bit over an hour, or ride the narrow-gauge Appulo Lucane line from Bari; the national rail network does not reach Matera.
Flight
Bari Karol Wojtyla Airport (BRI)
Bari's airport, 65 km north east, is the usual way in, with European and Italian routes thinning in winter. Direct coaches leave from outside the terminal and take roughly an hour and a quarter; hire cars the same. They set down at the top of the modern town, five to ten minutes' walk from the main square and the Sassi. Departures are timed to flights but thin on Sundays and late evening, so check the last one before booking a night arrival. Brindisi and Naples are much longer fallbacks.
Train
Matera Centrale, Piazza Matteotti
Matera is the rare Italian provincial capital that the national railway does not serve. What it has instead is the Appulo Lucane narrow-gauge line, which climbs from its own platforms at Bari Centrale through Altamura and Gravina in about an hour and a half and terminates in the middle of the modern town, a short walk from the main square. It does not run on Sundays and public holidays, when replacement buses cover the route, and services are sparser than a mainline traveller expects, so look at the timetable before you build a day around it.
Coach
The terminals at the top of the modern town
Long-distance coaches are how most Italians get here: direct runs from Rome take roughly four and a half to five hours, Naples and Salerno rather less, and Bari city and airport a bit over an hour. Because there is no change involved they often beat the train comfortably on both time and hassle, and several operators run the Rome route daily.
Drive
From Bari it is about an hour on the fast road up onto the plateau, and from the Naples side you cross Basilicata on the Basento valley road. The old town is a restricted traffic zone watched by cameras and most of the Sassi is stepped and simply unreachable by car, so aim for the paid car parks around the upper town, ask your hotel where its nearest drivable point is, and plan on carrying bags down the last stretch.
Getting around
Walking
The only real way through the Sassi, and short but vertical: half an hour end to end, mostly stepped, cobbled and polished slick underfoot. Plan routes downhill and expect a serious climb back up.
Free
Ape and tuk-tuk shuttles
Three-wheeled Ape vans run short hops and circuits along the few Sassi lanes wide enough for them. They are the standard workaround for luggage, heat or steps, and they reach places no taxi will attempt.
TBC
Taxi
A small fleet, found near the main square and the stations rather than cruising. Drivers know where the drivable road ends for each cave hotel. Book ahead for an early coach or train.
TBC
Town bus
Buses serve the modern town, the outer housing districts built for the families moved out of the caves, and the ring road above the ravine. They will get you to the edge of the old town and no further into it.
TBC
Car
Worth having for the belvedere across the gorge, the Murgia park and the day trips; useless in the old town, where the restricted zone, gradients and stairs rule it out. Park in the upper town.
TBC
Day trips from Matera
Altamura
Half dayBread town and cathedral
The nearest sizeable town, over the Puglia border. Frederick II founded the 13th century cathedral, whose carved portal is the best thing there; the walled centre is a grid of claustri courtyards. The draw is the bread, a protected wood-oven loaf outranking even Matera's. A Neanderthal skeleton stays fused into its karst cave underground; the museum in town tells that story and the sinkhole's.
Getting there
car | train
About 25 min by car, or a short hop on the Appulo Lucane train
Gravina in Puglia
Half dayRavine town and aqueduct bridge
Matera's quieter cousin on its own gorge: the same rock churches and cave houses, a fraction of the visitors. The set piece is the aqueduct bridge striding across the ravine, walkable for the view back and famous from a spy film opening. Below lies an underground town of cellars, cisterns and a rock church, plus a bone-lined crypt; order the cave-aged cheese and celery.
Getting there
car | train
About 35-40 min by car or on the Appulo Lucane line
Craco
Half dayAbandoned hill village
A medieval village on a clay ridge under a Norman tower, abandoned from the 1960s after landslides and an earthquake wrecked it, its people rehoused in the valley. It stands empty and roofless above the badlands, filmed for everything from biblical epics to Bond. Entry is guided, hard hat, fixed route, the only sane way; the drive through eroded clay hills is half the point.
Getting there
car | tour
About 1 hr by car south west; no useful public transport
Alberobello and the Valle d'Itria
Full dayTrulli country
Whole hillside districts of trulli, the conical drystone huts with whitewashed walls and grey slab roofs unique to this corner of Puglia, World Heritage listed and still lived in among the olives. Alberobello is a souvenir town by lunchtime, so go early and pair it with Locorotondo and Martina Franca. Public transport from Basilicata is poor; a car or a tour is close to essential.
Getting there
car | tour
About 1 hr 15 by car east; awkward without one
Metaponto
Half dayMagna Graecia ruins
Greek colonists here in the 7th century BC grew rich on grain and minted coins with an ear of wheat. Fifteen Doric columns of a temple to Hera stand in an open field, nothing built around them; the excavated town and museum are a short drive on. Pythagoras supposedly died here. The Ionian beaches are minutes away, wide, pine-backed and packed in high summer.
Getting there
car
About 45 min by car south east to the Ionian coast
Bari
Full dayPuglian port capital
A big, loud working port whose old town knots white lanes around the basilica holding the relics of Saint Nicholas, stolen from Anatolia by local sailors in 1087 and still drawing Orthodox pilgrims from eastern Europe. Watch women making orecchiette on tables in the street, walk the seafront, see the Norman-Swabian castle, and eat raw seafood at the harbour if your stomach is game.
Getting there
car | train
About 1 hr 15 by car, or 1 hr 30 on the Appulo Lucane train
Castelmezzano and Pietrapertosa
Full dayLucanian Dolomites villages
Two villages wedged into jagged sandstone pinnacles that rise out of the Basilicata forest like a small alpine range, houses jammed between rocks, stairs cut to a ruined Norman lookout, and a steel cable people fly across face down in season. Driving is slow and switchbacked, the late light on the pinnacles is the reason to go, and it is high enough for a jumper.
Getting there
car
About 1 hr 30 by car west into the mountains
A little history of Matera
Matera sits on the Murgia, a limestone plateau with almost no surface water, above the Gravina gorge. The rock is soft enough to dig by hand and hardens in air, so people hollowed shelters in prehistory and never stopped, caves becoming houses and terraces whose facades were built from their spoil. Water holds it together: a cistern under every floor, channels off roofs and streets into shared tanks, a reservoir beneath the main square. Byzantine-rite monks cut and frescoed churches into both banks from the 8th century, the Normans built up the middle spur, and by the 17th century Matera was provincial capital, losing the title to Potenza in 1806.
As the population grew into the 20th century, caves meant for one family took several plus animals, one opening, no sanitation; malaria was endemic and infant mortality catastrophic. Carlo Levi, exiled here by the Fascists, described the Sassi in a 1945 book Italy read as an indictment: the phrase national shame stuck, and in 1952 a law ordered them cleared, fifteen thousand people rehoused on the plateau, the old town left locked and looted for three decades. A 1986 law funded restoration, UNESCO listed the Sassi in 1993, and by 2019 the caves were Basilicata's most valuable property. Older residents remember being moved out, worth remembering while photographing the view.
Caves in the gorge are occupied and neolithic villages ring the plateau above, beginning a run of settlement that makes Matera one of the longest continuously inhabited places on earth.
Monks of the Greek rite cut and fresco scores of rupestrian churches into both banks of the Gravina; the town spreads as a system of caves, cisterns and terraces.
The cathedral is raised in Apulian Romanesque on the Civita, the rock spur dividing the two sassi, giving the cave town a conventional skyline.
Matera is made capital of the province of Basilicata and acquires the palaces and churches of the upper town, then loses the title to Potenza under French rule and slides back into the margins.
Carlo Levi publishes his account of internal exile in Basilicata, whose description of children and animals in the Sassi reaches the whole country.
National politicians visit, the Sassi are publicly branded a disgrace, and a special law orders them evacuated; roughly fifteen thousand people are rehoused over the following years in new districts and purpose-built villages on the plateau.
A second law funds restoration and reoccupation, and the first leases on empty caves are taken up.
The Sassi and the park of the rupestrian churches are inscribed on the World Heritage list.
Matera stands in for ancient Jerusalem in a film seen worldwide, beginning a long run of productions that fixes its image abroad, and in 2019 serves as European Capital of Culture, after which visitor numbers step up permanently.
Know before you go
Payment
Cards & cash mixed
English
Widely spoken
Wifi
Reliable
Power
Type C / F / L
230 V, 50 Hz
Dialing
+39
Mobile network & SIM card
Get an eSIM before you fly
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FAQs about Matera
▸ When is the best time to visit Matera?
March to November is comfortable, and its two ends are best: spring, when the Murgia is green with flowers before it burns off, and autumn, when the light goes gold and the stone cools. Midsummer works and is liveliest, but midday on unshaded rock is brutal: walk early and late, caves and museums in the afternoon. The cold months are quiet, sometimes wet, often windy in the gorge and short on opening hours.
▸ How many days do you need in Matera?
Two full days is the honest answer: one for the cave houses, rock churches, cistern and museums, one for the far side of the gorge and getting lost in the lanes at both ends of the day. Add a third for the frescoed crypt outside town or a day trip. As a stop between Naples and Puglia it works in a long day, but you miss the evening, the best hour here.
▸ Should you stay in a cave hotel?
Yes, if you can manage the steps: nowhere else offers it. Restored caves are cool, silent, vaulted and often beautifully lit, with tool marks and cisterns left visible. The trade-offs are real. Some rooms have no daylight, phone signal often dies, humidity is a permanent battle so bathrooms can feel damp, and the door is up a stepped lane, not a driveway. Ask how far the nearest drivable point is and whether they carry luggage.
▸ Can you visit Matera as a day trip from Bari or Puglia?
Easily, and plenty of people do: a bit over an hour by coach or car from Bari, around an hour and a half on the narrow-gauge train, a straightforward day out from the coast or the trulli country. The catch is that day trippers arrive and leave inside the same window, so they see the Sassi at their hottest and busiest, never lit. If you have one night in Basilicata, spend it here.
▸ Do you need a car in Matera?
Not for the town, where a car is close to useless: the old centre is a restricted zone, the Sassi are stairs, and everything worth seeing is within half an hour on foot. You want one for the belvedere across the gorge, the crypt on the old Roman road and the day trips, none well served by public transport. A workable compromise: walk for a day or two, then hire a car for one day.
▸ How hard is the walking, and is Matera manageable with limited mobility?
The Sassi are demanding: hundreds of irregular steps, worn slippery stone, very few handrails, several of the best sights on foot only. Hard with a stroller, suitcase or bad knee, impossible in a wheelchair across much of the old town. The flat upper town is easy, the main square, museums and cathedral reachable, and the belvedere across the gorge gives the great view by car. Ape shuttles exist for this and reach more than taxis.
▸ Is Matera expensive?
By Italian standards it splits in two. Basilicata is one of the cheapest regions in the country, and eating and drinking reflects that: local wine, bread and vegetable-heavy cooking well under Tuscan rates. Accommodation is the exception: the design-led cave hotels price themselves as a destination and the good ones sell out well ahead, so book early or stay in the upper town, much softer on the budget and five minutes from the caves.
▸ Has Matera become too touristy?
Busier every year: the Capital of Culture year and a run of films made it a fixture, so the main routes carry a procession by mid-morning and the caves along them are hotels and shops, not homes. It has not tipped over yet. Walk five minutes off the obvious lines, come out before eight or after six, or cross to the Murgia side, and it is more or less yours. The upper town works regardless.
▸ What should you eat and drink here?
Start with the bread, a protected wood-oven loaf with a thick crust and yellow crumb that keeps for days, and the peppers: peperoni cruschi, dried sweet peppers fried until they shatter, over pasta or salt cod. Look for crapiata, a bean and grain soup, cialledda, stale bread with tomato and oil, hand-rolled strascinati and cavatelli, wild lampascioni bulbs and pecorino from the plateau. The red to order is Aglianico from the volcanic slopes west.
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