There are more than a hundred and fifty churches cut into the rock in and around Matera, and the word for them is rupestrian, meaning simply of the rock. They are not churches built of stone. They are churches removed…
Supporting Guide
The Belvedere and the Murgia Park
The best thing to do in Matera is to leave it and look back. The town cannot be seen from inside itself. Standing in the Sassi you are too close and too low, and the famous stacked shape simply does…
The Best Time to Visit Matera
Matera is a town of bare pale stone, built in tiers, with almost no shade and a great many steps. Every seasonal decision here follows from that one sentence. It is why spring and early autumn are so obviously the…
The Best Photo Spots in Matera
Matera has one problem as a subject, and knowing it in advance is most of the job: the town cannot be photographed from inside itself. Stand anywhere in the Sassi and you are too close and too low. What you…
Where to Eat and Drink in Matera
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…
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…
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…
