Matera

I struggle to convey just how much I loved Matera. One of the most beautiful towns you will never have heard of. Well you should have heard of it as it was European City of Culture 2019. And it is the setting for the car case in the next Bond movie.

Let us start with our apartment. One of the things Matera is "famed" for is being a hilltop town where the houses were largely built into the rocky hillside. Our place, La Casa Nella Roccia was just that. Honestly it couldn't have been more perfect. And ridiculously good value. The owner and her son were waiting for us to tell us about the place, and to give us a precious parking spot outside the house.

As we were later to learn, these cave dwellings were occupied by local peasants into the 1960s, but then abandoned because of the high infant mortality. I can imagine things were different if our little place, rather than the mezzanine level it now has, was instead one room housing a family of ten. And their mule and chickens. Instead ours had two en suite bedrooms living room/kitchen. All mod cons plus character. And just on the edge of the most beautiful part of town.

Matera is just the very most photogenic place. Its not really somewhere to see things so much as to endlessly wander around its tight twisting streets and alleyways. So we did.

 The town is beautifully free of modern houses. It is very much shabby chic. Certainly there are a few "projects" that someone could take on. But it oozes character.

Matera overlooks a steep ravine.

On the other side of the ravine are caves which the more adventurous can reach.

As I mentioned the town is European City of Culture. There was a Salvador Dali exhibition on, but I judged it a step too far to go to it, after Thibault having indulged me with the archaeological museum in Taranto!

 Now it so happened there was a parkour event in town, sadly the day after we left, but the place was full of young men in t-shirts trying to find flat roofs to hurl themselves off.

Now, if you are wondering at what you are looking at below, it is mule bones, used as a building material to support guttering. Waste not want not.

Matera doesn't get any less attractive in the evening, as we waited for a restaurant with a free table for dinner. Italians eat late, and the best places are booked up anyway. We were prepared to wait. Especially if we could sit with a glass of wine.

Next day, Thibault was champing at the bit go on a hike on the other side of the ravine. We went to the visitor centre, got a leaflet as a map and off we struck.

Well the hike was scenic, but frankly terrifying. We aborted as Thibault wasn't sure he was on the right path or we could see where it was leading. I say path, but there wasn't really one. You could just about make out a tiny ledge in parts, but more suited to goats than humans. One was walking along the side of a steep ravine where one's only footholds were tenacious tufts of grass.

Fortunately for me Thibault's intrepid nature is aligned with a decent sense of self-preservation. And even more thankfully, the preservation of an old fat guy in tow! There would have been more photos but I was concentrating on not sliding down to oblivion.

So we made our way back and drove a bit further on to a car park allowing pretty views of the town in the morning. No hike with rock cut churches for us.