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 built of stone. They are cut into it. What looks from across the ravine like a hillside of pale buildings stacked eight deep is a hillside that has been hollowed out, room by room, for something like nine thousand years, which makes this one of the longest continuously inhabited places on earth.

It is also, and I want to be honest about this early, a town that was a national scandal within living memory. In the 1950s the caves were emptied by law. The families were moved out to new housing on the plateau above, and for forty years the Sassi stood abandoned. What you walk through now is a place that was condemned, emptied, left, and then slowly and deliberately brought back. UNESCO listed it in 1993. It was European Capital of Culture in 2019.

One correction before anything else, because almost every guide gets it wrong.

Matera is in Basilicata, not Puglia. You will very likely arrive from Bari, and Bari is in Puglia, and so the whole town gets filed under a region it does not belong to. Basilicata is its own place with its own food and its own history, and it is poorer, emptier and less visited than its neighbour. If you come expecting Puglia you will spend three days slightly misreading everything you see.

Here is how the town works, what to do in it, and the practical things that catch people out.

What to book before you come

Matera is the one place I would tell you not to do entirely alone. The Sassi are a thousand years of people digging into a rock face, with almost no signage, so what you see unguided is a beautiful and largely unreadable town.

1. A guided walk through the Sassi, with a cave house. 4.7 from over seven thousand people, which for a small city is an enormous number. The cave house is what turns a view into a history.
2. The Sassi with the rock-cut churches. The same walk plus entry to the frescoed churches carved into the stone. Take this version if you care at all about the painting.
3. The shorter city centre tour. Gentler on the legs, which matters here. Everything in Matera is steps.

The belvedere across the ravine, the walk down to the Gravina and the upper town cost nothing.

What the Sassi actually are

There are two of them, and the word is just the Italian for stones.

Sasso Barisano faces north and is the more restored of the two: hotels, restaurants, smoother paving, the side that looks handsome in the evening. Sasso Caveoso faces south and is rougher, steeper and closer to what the place was, with cave mouths still open in the rock. Between and above them runs the Civita, the rock spur with the cathedral on top.

The thing that takes a while to see is that there is no ground level. A lane is a roof. The terrace where somebody is hanging washing is the top of the house below, and the steps at the end of it drop onto another roof, which is another lane. It is a town stacked on itself, and it is why a five minute walk on a map takes twenty and involves two hundred steps.

Walking the Sassi is free. There is no ticket to the district, no barrier, no closing time. What you pay for are the individual sites inside it, and they are all cheap.

How people lived here

The single most useful eight euros you will spend is on a furnished cave house.

One room. A bed, high off the floor. A loom. A recess for the mule, because the animal lived in the room with the family and its warmth was part of how the room was heated. A hole in the floor for a cistern. Somewhere between six and twelve people in a space the size of a modern living room, with no window except the door.

Read that, then walk back out into the lane and look at how many doorways there are.

This is the part of Matera that stops being picturesque, and it should. The 1950s clearance was not an act of vandalism, it was a response to malaria, infant mortality and conditions that a writer named Carlo Levi made famous when he was exiled here under the Fascists and wrote about what he found. The town you are photographing was emptied because it was killing people. It came back because the rooms turned out to be worth saving once the plumbing arrived.

I have written about the district itself, how it is built and who lives in it now, in my guide to the Sassi of Matera.

Top things to do

In rough order of how much they will stay with you.

A furnished cave house. Eight euros, which is a combined ticket also covering a snow store, a natural grotto and a rock-cut church, roughly nine to seven in season. Do it first.

The multimedia house museum on the history of the town. Seven euros, free to FAI members, roughly ten to seven. Half an hour, and it explains what you are looking at for the rest of your stay. Several people told me to do this first and they were right.

The underground cistern beneath the main square. Around three euros. An enormous rock-cut water chamber, fifteen metres deep, plastered smooth, that the town walked over for decades without knowing it was there. Small guided groups on limited slots, typically mid-morning and mid-afternoon, and no online booking, so buy at the entrance early in the day.

The rock-cut churches. Two to four euros each, and there are more than a hundred and fifty in and around the town.

The museum of contemporary sculpture in a palazzo whose lower rooms are caves. The contrast does something to both halves.

The full ranked version, with what to skip, is in my guide to the best things to do in Matera, and the painted churches have a guide of their own in the rupestrian churches of Matera.

The water, which is the real story

Nobody builds a town on a waterless limestone plateau unless they have solved water, and Matera solved it about as thoroughly as anywhere in the ancient world.

Under the streets is a system of cisterns, channels and gutters that caught every drop of rain that fell on the roofs and the lanes and moved it downhill from house to house. Most cave dwellings had their own small cistern, cut into the floor. Above them all sits an enormous communal one beneath the main square, fifteen metres deep, its walls rendered with a waterproof plaster and its roof carved out into vaults. It supplied the town for centuries. It was then forgotten so completely that the square above it was used for parking, and it was only properly rediscovered and opened to visitors in recent decades.

You can walk down into it now for about three euros, in small groups, on limited slots bought at the entrance on the day. Stand at the bottom of a chamber the size of a church, look up at the single opening where the light comes in, and the whole town suddenly makes sense: not a village that happened to be in caves, but a piece of engineering.

Day trips, and the rest of Basilicata

Matera is small enough that most people fold a half day elsewhere into a three-day stay.

Altamura, twenty minutes away and over the border in Puglia, is the other great bread town, with a DOP loaf that locals will tell you is the better one. There is a decent argument on both sides and it is worth having in person.

Gravina in Puglia has its own ravine, its own cave quarter and a photogenic aqueduct bridge across the gorge, and sees a fraction of the visitors.

Craco, about an hour south and firmly in Basilicata, is an abandoned hill village evacuated after landslides in the 1960s and now visited on hard-hat tours. It is the strangest thing in the region and the least comfortable, in a way that fits Matera rather well.

If you have a car, all three are easy. Without one, Altamura is the realistic option, on the same narrow-gauge line you arrived on.

The ravine

The town sits on the lip of a gorge called the Gravina, and the gorge is half of why it looks the way it does.

On the far side is a limestone plateau, the Murgia, scattered with more caves and more rock churches and almost nothing else. That far rim is where the famous photograph of Matera is taken from, and getting there on foot means going down into the ravine, across a suspension footbridge over the river, and up the other side. It is about four kilometres round trip and takes ninety minutes at a reasonable pace, and it is the best thing I did here.

You can also drive round to it in fifteen minutes, which is the right answer in July.

The walk, the bridge and the viewpoint are covered properly in my guide to the Belvedere and the Murgia park.

Getting around once you are here

You walk. There is no other answer inside the Sassi and there does not need to be.

What matters is understanding that the map lies to you. Distances are short and routes are not: the town is built in tiers, so getting from a lane to the lane thirty metres below it can mean walking three minutes in the wrong direction to find the stairs that connect them. Give everything twice the time you think, and stop reading the map as a flat thing.

Two practical notes. Wear real shoes, because the paving is polished stone, worn round by centuries and genuinely slippery in the wet. And there is a small electric shuttle bus that loops the upper streets, which is worth knowing about at the end of a long day or in August.

Cars are the other thing. Driving into the Sassi is largely not possible and not advisable, and the sensible plan is to park on the plateau above and come down on foot. If your hotel is deep in the district, ask them before you arrive where to leave the car and how far you will be carrying a bag, and take the answer seriously.

Where to stay

The reason to stay in Matera rather than day-trip from Bari is that you can sleep in a cave.

That is not a gimmick. The rooms are genuine, they are cut into the rock, they hold a steady cool temperature in August, and the good ones are lit by candles in wall niches because there is nowhere to put a window. The best known has eighteen rooms in the oldest part of the Sassi, facing the ravine, with a former rock church as the sitting room.

Two honest warnings. Cave rooms are dark, and if you need daylight to wake up you will not enjoy one. And the Sassi are stairs, everywhere, with no road access to most doors, which matters enormously if you have a large suitcase or a bad knee.

I have gone through what the rooms are really like, what to ask before booking, and where to stay if stairs are a problem, in where to stay in Matera.

Where to eat

Lucanian food, not Puglian, and it is peasant cooking that never had to apologise for itself.

Pane di Matera is the town’s bread and it has protected status. Durum wheat, natural leavening, baked into a tall horned loaf with a crust like a shell and a deep yellow crumb that keeps for a week. Peperoni cruschi are the signature: sweet dried peppers from further south, flash-fried for seconds until they go glassy and shatter like a crisp, served on their own or crumbled over everything. Crapiata is a slow-cooked pulse and grain soup traditionally made in early August. Cialledda is a bread salad, which is what you make when the bread is too good to throw away.

The full guide, with where to actually eat it, is in where to eat and drink in Matera.

What it costs

Matera is inexpensive by Italian standards once you are there, and the sites are almost apologetically cheap.

A furnished cave house is eight euros on a combined ticket. The underground cistern is about three. The multimedia history museum is seven. Individual rock-cut churches run two to four euros each. The painted crypt outside town is ten and is the one thing you must book online in advance, since there are no walk-ins at all.

Where the money goes is the room. Cave hotels are the town’s luxury product and priced like it, particularly in May, September and October. If you want one, book early and expect to pay properly for it. Everything else, including eating extremely well, is cheap.

Getting here

This is where people come unstuck, so read this bit twice.

There is no Trenitalia service to Matera. The national rail network does not reach it. The train is run by a private narrow-gauge company, Ferrovie Appulo Lucane, and it leaves from its own station, a separate building on the western side of Piazza Aldo Moro in Bari, not from the Bari Centrale platforms you would arrive at from Rome. People stand in the wrong station with a valid ticket.

The journey is about seventy-four kilometres and takes roughly an hour and three quarters, running about hourly from early morning to mid evening.

And there are no trains at all on Sundays. The same company runs a bus instead, which takes about an hour. If your plan involves arriving in Matera on a Sunday afternoon by train, it does not work, and you will find that out at the station.

Get off at Matera Centrale, which is underground and a couple of hundred metres from the old town.

All of it, including driving and which airport to use, is in getting to Matera.

When to come

Spring and early autumn. April, May, late September, October. Roughly ten to twenty degrees, comfortable walking, manageable crowds.

July and August are hard here. Highs average around thirty and the heat waves go well past that, and this is a town of bare pale stone with almost no shade and a great many steps. The heat holds from about nine in the morning until six in the evening. It is also the busiest and most expensive stretch of the year.

If you do come in summer, and I did, the town becomes an early-morning and after-six place, and the middle of the day is for the cave interiors, which stay cool without trying.

Month by month, with the festivals, is in the best time to visit Matera.

Matera after dark

The town does something at dusk that I have not seen anywhere else. The lights come on in the rock windows one tier at a time, and because the houses are stacked, what you get is not a lit street but a lit wall, hundreds of small warm openings in a cliff, with the ravine below going completely black.

Stand on a terrace on the Barisano side at about half past eight in summer and watch it happen.

Where to stand, and at what hour, is in the best photo spots in Matera.

The one thing to book ahead

Almost nothing here needs reserving, which is part of the pleasure. Two things do.

The underground cistern runs small guided groups on limited slots and cannot be booked online at all, so buy at the entrance early in the day rather than turning up at five and hoping. And the painted crypt outside town must be booked in advance on its own website, with no walk-ins, which catches out a lot of people who assume they can drive over and pay at a door.

Cave hotels are the third. Not for a day, but for the trip: the good rooms are few and they go months ahead for May, September and October.

The films, and why everyone says Jerusalem

You will hear within about an hour that Matera doubles as ancient Jerusalem on film, and it is true often enough that the town has a small industry in it. Bare stone, no visible modern surfaces, a topography that reads as biblical, and a population used to crews.

I mention it for a reason beyond trivia. It tells you what the place looks like to a camera, which is: older than it is, and emptier than it is. Both of those are worth knowing before you photograph it. The town is neither ancient in the parts most people shoot, since much of the Sassi as you see it was rebuilt from the eighties onward, nor empty, since around three thousand people live down there now. What the lens does to Matera is exactly what your own photographs will do to it, and being aware of that makes for a better set of pictures and a more honest one.

Who Matera is for

It suits anyone who likes a place with a difficult history told plainly, anyone who walks, and anyone who would rather look at one extraordinary thing for three days than tick off nine ordinary ones.

It suits couples, and it is genuinely romantic in a way that has nothing to do with how it is marketed.

It is hard work with a pushchair, hard work with limited mobility, and hard work with wheeled luggage. None of that is a reason not to come; it is a reason to book a room on the upper streets rather than deep in the Sassi.

Two days is enough to see it. Three is enough to stop hurrying, and three is what I would take.

How long you need

One day gets you the Sassi, a cave house, the cistern and one viewpoint, and you will feel rushed.

Two days adds the rock churches, the ravine walk and an evening with nothing planned.

Three days adds the far side of the gorge properly, the crypt outside town, and the thing that actually matters here, which is being in the streets early and late when the light is doing the work.

The day-by-day version is in a Matera itinerary.

More images from Matera

Your Matera Guides

Everything here in detail, guide by guide.

• The Sassi of Matera
• The Best Things to Do in Matera
• A Matera Itinerary: 2 to 3 Days
• Where to Stay in Matera
• Where to Eat and Drink in Matera
• The Best Photo Spots in Matera
• The Best Time to Visit Matera
• The Belvedere and the Murgia Park
• The Rupestrian Churches of Matera
• Getting to Matera

Matera Travel Diaries

• Matera, and the Town That Was Emptied
• Matera at Six, When the Town Comes Back
• Matera, and the Bread They Had to Sign

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Matera in Puglia?

No. Matera is the provincial capital of Matera in Basilicata, the region next door. The confusion comes from the fact that most people arrive from Bari, which is in Puglia. The food, the history and the identity are Lucanian rather than Puglian, and locals notice when you get it right.

Do you need a ticket to visit the Sassi?

No. Walking the Sassi districts is free and there is no gate or closing time. You pay only for individual sites inside them, and those are inexpensive: eight euros for a furnished cave house on a combined ticket, about three for the underground cistern, seven for the multimedia history museum and two to four for each rock-cut church.

How do you get to Matera from Bari?

By the narrow-gauge Ferrovie Appulo Lucane line, which takes about an hour and three quarters and runs roughly hourly. It leaves from its own station on the western side of Piazza Aldo Moro, not from the main Bari Centrale platforms. There are no trains on Sundays, when the same company runs a bus instead, taking about an hour.

How many days do you need in Matera?

Two days covers the town comfortably. Three lets you add the far side of the ravine, the painted crypt outside town, and time in the streets at the beginning and end of the day, which is when Matera is at its best. One day is possible but rushed.

Can you sleep in a cave in Matera?

Yes, and it is the main reason to stay rather than day-trip. Cave hotels are genuine rooms cut into the rock, naturally cool in summer and usually lit by candles and lamps because there is nowhere to put a window. The trade-offs are darkness and stairs, since most doors in the Sassi have no road access.

Is Matera too hot in summer?

July and August are difficult. Average highs sit around thirty degrees with heat waves going higher, the stone reflects it, and there is very little shade. The town becomes an early morning and evening place, with the cool cave interiors filling the middle of the day. Spring and early autumn are considerably more comfortable.

Is Matera walkable, and is it suitable for everyone?

It is walkable and small, but it is built in tiers with hundreds of steps and very few level routes. There is no road access to many doorways. It is demanding with a pushchair, with wheeled luggage or with limited mobility, and anyone in that position should book on the upper streets rather than down in the Sassi.

Is Matera worth visiting?

Yes, and for a specific reason. It is not a pretty town with an old quarter, it is a single continuous piece of human history that you walk around inside, with a difficult recent past that it does not hide. Two or three days there is more memorable than a week somewhere more comfortable.