The food here is Lucanian, and if you order it as though you were in Puglia you will eat well and miss the point entirely. Basilicata is the poorer, emptier region next door to Puglia, and its cooking comes from…
Archives for August 2026
Where to Stay in Matera
Almost everyone comes to Matera wanting to sleep in a cave, and almost nobody asks what that is actually like. It is worth doing. It is also the one accommodation decision in Italy where the romantic version and the practical…
A Matera Itinerary: 2 to 3 Days
Matera is a two day town that rewards a third day disproportionately. Two days will get you everything on the list. The third is the one where you stop moving through the place and start being in it, and it…
The Best Things to Do in Matera
Matera is small and the list is short, which is a compliment. You are not going to be choosing between forty attractions. There are perhaps six things that matter, they are all cheap, and the town itself is the seventh…
The Sassi of Matera
The Sassi are not a neighbourhood. They are the town, and the word simply means stones. Most people arrive with a picture in their head of a hillside of pale houses and leave with something considerably stranger, because the houses…
The Complete Guide to Matera
Matera is a town that people lived inside rather than on top of. That is the whole thing, and it takes about ten minutes on the ground to understand it in a way no photograph manages. The houses are not…
Lecce – The Road Between Two Summers
There are two summers here and they do not touch. One of them is the old town in the morning. Honey stone, and shutters going up, and a boy carrying a tray of something across a square at an angle…
Lecce, and the Hour Everyone Comes Out
At six the city is still shut. Not closed. Shut, the way a hand is shut. Shutters down, lanes empty, the limestone holding the whole of the day it has been given and handing none of it back. I went…
Getting to Lecce and Around the Salento
Two airports serve this end of Puglia and only one of them is the sensible answer. Brindisi sits roughly 39 kilometres from Lecce. Bari is around 110. Almost everything on this page follows from that gap, and it is worth…
The Best Day Trips from Lecce
Nothing here happens by accident. There is no harbour at the end of the street and no ferry to drift onto, so a day outside the walls is a day you commit to the night before, and you leave early,…
The Best Beaches Near Lecce
No quantity of turquoise photographs filed under the name of this city will change the fact that it has no beach of its own. The city sits in the middle of the flat Salento plain, and the closest water, at…
The Best Time to Visit Lecce
Lecce is inland, and that single fact decides most of what follows. There is no sea breeze to take the edge off four in the afternoon, no water to step into when the light goes hard. The city sits on…
