Matera

Matera sits inland on a limestone plateau, so the beach is a day out, not part of daily life. The nearest shore is the Ionian coast around Metaponto and Policoro, about 45 minutes by car. There you find long, wide sandy beaches backed by pine woods and calm, shallow water that reaches about 25°C in August, which makes them easy for children. The Adriatic towns of Puglia, with rocky coves and clearer water, are well over an hour away. Without a car the sea is hard to reach, and most visitors to Matera never swim at all.

Food in Matera is the peasant cooking of Basilicata, plain and confident. The base is pane di Matera, a durum-wheat loaf with a thick crust and a horn-like shape. Around it come fave e cicoria, crapiata (a soup of mixed pulses), hand-made cavatelli and orecchiette, roast lamb, and peperoni cruschi, sweet dried peppers fried until they crackle. Caciocavallo and pecorino come from the surrounding hills, and the strong red to drink is Aglianico del Vulture.

Many of the restaurants are in cave rooms in the Sassi. The better cooking and fairer prices are often in the upper town around Via Ridola and Piazza Vittorio Veneto. It is a small city, so there is little range beyond regional cooking, and no real street food or market culture.

The Sassi are the reason to come. Two ravine-side districts, Sasso Caveoso and Sasso Barisano, are made of cave dwellings, carved churches and stacked houses that climb the side of the Gravina gorge. People have lived in them since prehistoric times. Between them, on the Civita hill, stands the Romanesque cathedral. Rock churches such as Santa Maria de Idris, San Pietro Barisano and Santa Lucia alle Malve keep faded Byzantine and medieval frescoes, and furnished cave houses show how families lived alongside their animals until the 1950s.

In the upper town, the Palombaro Lungo is a huge water cistern under the main piazza that you can walk through. The Museo Ridola holds regional archaeology, Palazzo Lanfranchi has Carlo Levi's large panorama of Lucanian life, and MUSMA displays sculpture in carved rock rooms. The set is small but like nowhere else, and it is at its best at dusk, when the lights come on across the Sassi.

Evenings in Matera revolve around the passeggiata along Via del Corso and Piazza Vittorio Veneto, a long dinner, and a glass of wine on a terrace above the lit-up Sassi. A handful of wine bars and cocktail bars in cave rooms stay open late in summer, and there is a small student crowd. There are no real clubs, and outside the warm months the town is quiet soon after dinner. It suits couples who want a beautiful setting for a drink, not anyone who wants a night out.

The Gravina gorge sits right below the Sassi. On the far side is the Parco della Murgia Materana, a stony upland of wild thyme, grazing land and caves. From the bottom of Sasso Caveoso a path drops to the stream and climbs up to the Belvedere at Murgia Timone, where trails lead past abandoned rock churches and Neolithic village sites, with the best view of the town. Kestrels nest in the cliffs.

Further out, the jagged sandstone peaks of the Lucanian Dolomites are about an hour and a quarter by car, and the beech and pine forests of the Pollino national park are a longer day. Spring and autumn are the seasons for walking. In July and August the bare plateau is very hot, so set out early.

Matera sits on the border with Puglia, which makes it a good base for exploring. Altamura, famous for its bread and cathedral, is twenty minutes away, and Gravina in Puglia, with its bridge over its own ravine, is not much further. Within about an hour you reach the trulli of Alberobello, the white towns of the Valle d'Itria such as Locorotondo, Martina Franca and Ostuni, and the old town of Bari. Castel del Monte, the octagonal castle of Frederick II, and Polignano a Mare on its sea cliffs are about the same distance away.

In Basilicata itself, the abandoned hill town of Craco, the Greek temple of Hera at Metaponto, and the villages of Castelmezzano and Pietrapertosa among the peaks all make strong outings. For almost all of them you need a car.

Children are welcome everywhere in Matera, and older ones usually enjoy the caves, the underground cistern and scrambling down into the gorge. But nothing in the town is made for children. The Sassi are a maze of steep, uneven stone steps where a pushchair is useless, and summer afternoons are hot with little shade. Families do best with a short stay, a baby carrier, and a car for trips to the sandy Ionian beaches or the trulli of Alberobello.

Within Matera everything is on foot. The upper town is flat and easy, and the Sassi are a short walk below, though you reach them by steep stairways and lanes that wear out the legs. Cars cannot enter most of the old districts. Getting further is harder. Matera is off the national rail network, a slow narrow-gauge line runs to Bari in about an hour and a half, and buses are sparse. Most day trips, the beaches and the parks are far easier with a hire car.

Shopping in Matera is small-scale and mostly aimed at visitors. Workshops and stalls in the Sassi sell the cuccù, a painted terracotta whistle shaped like a cockerel, alongside miniature carvings of the town in local tufa stone, papier-mâché, and ceramics. The upper town has ordinary Italian high-street shops along Via del Corso. Food is the best thing to take home: dried peppers, local pasta and bottles of Aglianico.

Eating and drinking in Matera cost noticeably less than in the big Italian cities, especially in the simple trattorias of the upper town. The Sassi themselves are pricier. Cave hotels and boutique stays there are the town's speciality and are priced accordingly, and the busiest summer weeks push up rates. Guesthouses in the newer town are much cheaper and only a short walk from the old districts. Most sights cost little, and walking the Sassi and the Murgia is free.

Matera has little regular live performance. The music conservatory puts on concerts, and summer brings open-air events and a jazz festival, some of them staged against the backdrop of the Sassi. The Festa della Bruna, the town's patron feast with its procession and the ritual tearing apart of a papier-mâché float, is the big night of the year. Otherwise evenings are for dinner and the view.

There are no thermal baths or bathing traditions in Matera. The wellness on offer is in hotel spas, some of them set in candlelit cave rooms with pools cut into the rock, which is an unusual way to unwind. The town's real calm comes from its pace: quiet mornings in the Sassi before the tour groups arrive, long lunches, and evenings watching the light fade over the gorge. The quieter months, from autumn to spring, are the most restful.