Bari or Matera?

Bari has the sea on its doorstep. Pane e Pomodoro is a sandy city beach you can walk to, and the regional train reaches the cliff coves of Polignano and the clear inlets around Monopoli in about half an hour, so a swim fits easily into a half-day.

Matera is inland, and swimming means a drive of around 45 minutes to the Ionian coast at Metaponto or Policoro. The beaches there are long, sandy and shallow, backed by pine woods, but without a car they are hard to reach. Most visitors to Matera skip the sea altogether.

Bari is the stronger place to eat, largely because of its street life around food. You can watch orecchiette being rolled in the doorways of Bari Vecchia, buy focaccia and fried sgagliozze from kitchen windows, and eat raw urchins and octopus by the fishermen's pier. Puglia's Primitivo and Negroamaro go with all of it.

Matera's cooking is more austere: crusty pane di Matera, bean and chicory dishes, crapiata, roast lamb and crackling dried peppers, with Aglianico to drink. It is good, honest food, often served in cave dining rooms, but there is no street food or market culture to explore between meals.

Matera has the more remarkable sights. The Sassi are cave dwellings and stacked houses inhabited since prehistory, climbing the side of a gorge. Add frescoed rock churches such as Santa Maria de Idris, the walk-through cistern of the Palombaro Lungo and sculpture shown in carved rooms at MUSMA, and you have a place unlike anywhere else in Italy.

Bari's heritage is more conventional and less absorbing. The Basilica di San Nicola is a fine Romanesque church and a pilgrimage site, and the cathedral, the castle and the Murat quarter's palazzi make a pleasant day or two of sightseeing. None of it carries the sense of strangeness you feel at dusk over the Sassi.

Of the two, Bari is the only one where a night out can carry on after dinner. It is the capital of Puglia and a university city, so the people out late are mostly young locals rather than visitors. It also has the two things Matera lacks: a few real clubs, and enough wine and cocktail bars that you can move from the squares at the edge of Bari Vecchia to the Umbertino grid and on to the seafront. The scene is friendly and mostly outdoors rather than big, and it thins out a good deal in the cooler months.

Matera's evenings are built around dinner. After the passeggiata on Via del Corso and a long meal, you can go on to one of a handful of cave wine bars, some with a terrace over the lit Sassi, and that is about all. It is a lovely place for a couple's last glass, but there is nowhere to dance, and outside summer the town goes quiet soon after dinner.

Matera has wild country right at its edge. The Gravina gorge runs beneath the Sassi, and across it the Parco della Murgia Materana has trails past abandoned rock churches, with kestrels nesting in the cliffs. The sandstone peaks of the Lucanian Dolomites are a feasible day out.

Bari's landscape is flatter and gentler: olive groves, a long seafront promenade and easy cycling in the Valle d'Itria. Its best nature outing is the open karst plateau of the Alta Murgia, about an hour inland, which is good for quiet walks but much less dramatic than the gorge Matera has on its doorstep.

Both towns make fine bases for exploring, and their lists overlap: Alberobello, the white Valle d'Itria towns, Castel del Monte and Polignano are within reach of either. Bari has the edge because it covers more ground with less effort. Trains run along the coast to Trani and Monopoli, Lecce is reachable by rail, and Matera itself is a classic day trip from Bari.

Matera adds outings Bari cannot easily match, such as Altamura and Gravina nearby, the ghost town of Craco, the temple of Hera at Metaponto and the mountain villages of Castelmezzano and Pietrapertosa. Almost all of these need a car.

Bari is the easier city with children. The centre is flat and compact, the city beach is sandy, and the evening walk on the seafront with a gelato is a family ritual. The Grotte di Castellana and the Fasano safari park are short trips away.

Older children often love Matera's caves, the underground cistern and a scramble into the gorge. With toddlers, though, the steep stone steps rule out a pushchair, and the shadeless summer afternoons are draining. A short stay works best there.

Bari is better connected. The old town, the shopping streets and the promenade sit side by side on level ground, a train runs to the airport, and several regional lines fan out to the coast and inland towns. A car still helps for the Valle d'Itria.

Matera is walkable but hilly. The upper town is flat, while the Sassi are reached by leg-tiring stairways where cars cannot go. The town is off the national rail network, served only by a slow narrow-gauge line to Bari and sparse buses, so a hire car is close to essential for anything beyond town.

Neither is a shopping destination, but Bari has more range. Via Sparano in the Murat quarter has Italian chains and a few smarter boutiques, and the old town's delicatessens are good for taralli, olive oil and Puglian ceramics.

Matera's shops are small and aimed at visitors: painted cuccù whistles, tufa carvings of the Sassi and papier-mâché in workshops in the old districts. Beyond that, the most worthwhile purchases are dried peppers and Aglianico.

Costs are broadly similar, and both feel good value by Italian standards. What differs is where the money goes. In Bari, cheap street food and free sights keep daily costs low, while beach clubs, car hire and the July and August rush for rooms push the total up.

In Matera, meals in the upper town are inexpensive, but the town's speciality, a cave hotel in the Sassi, comes at a premium. Staying in a guesthouse in the newer town a short walk away saves a good deal.

The Teatro Petruzzelli, one of Italy's largest opera houses, gives Bari a full season of opera, ballet and symphonic concerts, and it is worth dressing up for. The Teatro Piccinni adds Italian-language drama, and in summer jazz and open-air concerts move into the piazzas and the castle.

Nothing in Matera compares. The conservatory puts on concerts, a summer jazz festival uses the Sassi as a backdrop, and the Festa della Bruna ends with the papier-mâché float torn apart after the procession. Most evenings, though, are about dinner and the view rather than a performance.

Neither has thermal baths, and both offer much the same: hotel spas and a slow southern pace. Matera's version is more distinctive, with spas in candlelit cave rooms and pools cut into rock, and its quiet off-season mornings in the Sassi are restful in a way a city cannot quite match.

Bari's calm comes from long lunches and the evening stroll on the seafront. Those wanting real pampering usually move out to a restored country estate beyond the city.