Matera Spent Decades as a National Embarrassment. Now It's Basilicata's Best Argument

Matera's Sassi, two cave-riddled districts cut into a ravine in Italy's southern region of Basilicata, were inhabited continuously for thousands of years before becoming, by the mid-20th century, a byword for national shame. Writer and physician Carlo Levi's 1945 account of internal exile in the region drew attention to the poverty and disease in the Sassi's overcrowded cave dwellings, and in 1952 the Italian government forcibly relocated most of the roughly 15,000 residents to new housing, leaving the old town largely abandoned for decades.

From liability to landmark

UNESCO listed the Sassi as a World Heritage Site in 1993, citing them as the most outstanding example of a troglodyte settlement in the Mediterranean, adapted to its ecosystem over millennia. That designation, followed by slow private restoration of individual cave houses into homes, hotels and restaurants, gradually reversed the town's fortunes. In 2019 Matera was named a European Capital of Culture, an unusual choice for a town of roughly 60,000 people that had been officially depopulated within living memory, and the honour brought a wave of new visibility, including its use as a filming location for several international productions.

What makes it worth the detour

Basilicata sits between the better-known regions of Campania and Puglia and is often skipped entirely by itineraries that link Naples or the Amalfi Coast to Puglia's heel. That is precisely Matera's appeal now: a UNESCO-calibre sight without the volume of visitors that Italy's more established stops carry, in a region with almost no other mass-tourism infrastructure to dilute it. Cave hotels dug into the same rock as the original dwellings let visitors stay inside the geology rather than merely photograph it, and the town's stone-cut churches, some converted from Byzantine-era rock chapels, are still being catalogued.

The wider Basilicata case

Beyond Matera, Basilicata offers a short, largely untroubled coastline on both the Tyrrhenian and Ionian seas, the dramatic limestone spires of the Dolomiti Lucane inland, and a food and wine culture built around Aglianico del Vulture wine and peperoni cruschi, dried sweet peppers fried to a crisp. None of it carries Tuscany or Puglia's pricing or crowds, at least for now, which is its own argument for going before that changes.

Traveller tips

• Bari's airport, around an hour and a half away by road, is the most practical arrival point; Matera has no airport of its own.
• Book a cave hotel stay rather than a conventional hotel to get the fullest sense of the Sassi's architecture.
• The Sassi's stepped, uneven stone lanes are not easily walkable for those with mobility difficulties; footwear matters more here than in most Italian towns.
• Spring and autumn avoid both summer heat radiating off the stone and winter's damp chill inside unheated cave interiors.