Matera After the Day-Trippers Leave

The two sassi, briefly

The sassi are two separate but adjacent cave districts, Sasso Barisano to the north and Sasso Caveoso to the south, separated by the ridge on which the Duomo sits. Barisano is the more polished of the two, with most of the hotels and restaurants. Caveoso is rougher, closer to how the sassi looked in the mid-twentieth century, and includes the still largely untouched rock church complex of Santa Maria de Idris, cut directly into a limestone spur above the ravine.

The best introduction is to walk from Piazza Vittorio Veneto down through Barisano to the Casa Grotta di Vico Solitario, a single sassi house preserved with its 1950s furniture and a small stall for the family donkey inside the same room where the family slept. The visit takes fifteen minutes and completely reframes the rest of the walk.

From Casa Grotta, cross the ridge to Caveoso and follow the path along the top of the Gravina ravine. On the far side of the ravine, dozens of rock churches, some containing Byzantine frescoes from the ninth to thirteenth centuries, are visible in the cliff face. The path is exposed; wear shoes with grip.

The rock churches, and how to see the best ones

Matera and its surrounding Parco della Murgia contain over one hundred and fifty chiese rupestri, rock-cut churches. Most are locked and require a guide. The most striking is the Cripta del Peccato Originale, sometimes called the Sistine Chapel of Rupestrian Art, a small ninth-century cave with a full cycle of frescoes discovered only in 1963. It is a fifteen-minute drive out of the city and requires an advance booking, but the frescoes are among the earliest surviving figurative works in southern Italy.

Closer to the sassi, Santa Maria de Idris and San Pietro Barisano are open to the public with a combined ticket. Both are worth an hour. In San Pietro's crypt, the seccatoi (cells where the dead were dried before final burial) are a startling reminder that the sassi were, until living memory, a functioning medieval town.

Where to be at dusk

The classic dusk viewpoint is from the Belvedere di Piazzetta Pascoli, on the far side of the Duomo ridge, looking east across Sasso Barisano as the lights come on. The whole district glows one lamp at a time, and the effect is worth the twenty minutes it takes to walk up. Arrive by six in autumn or nine in July.

For a second viewpoint, walk out along the Belvedere Guerricchio, above Caveoso, from where the entire ravine is visible with the rock churches on the far side lit by the setting sun. This is the view most Matera postcards use, and unlike most postcard views, it holds up in person.

Eat late. Matera restaurants stop serving lunch at three and reopen at eight; anything open earlier is a tourist trap. Ristorante Baccanti, in a cave on Via Sant'Angelo, does the classic Materan cavatelli with cime di rapa and fried anchovies.