Is Matera difficult to walk?

It is a city of staircases — rewarding, but genuinely steep and uneven in the Sassi. Good shoes are essential, and travellers with limited mobility should plan routes through the modern town's flat spine and take advice from their hotel on step-free approaches.

Should I stay in a cave hotel?

The cave hotels are atmospheric and worth experiencing once; light sleepers should know that grottoes mean few or no windows. The alternative is a noble palazzo above the Sassi — daylight, terraces and the view over the caves rather than the inside of one.

For the Sassi — two districts of cave dwellings inhabited for some nine thousand years, abandoned in the 1950s and now restored into cave hotels, rock churches and grotto restaurants. It is among the oldest continuously lived-in places on earth, UNESCO-listed, and unlike anywhere else in Italy.

How many days do you need in Matera?

Two nights is the honest minimum — one day for the two Sassi and the Civita, one for the cave churches and the canyon walk. The city changes completely at dawn and after dark, which is the argument for sleeping here rather than day-tripping from Bari or Puglia's coast.

Is Matera worth visiting as a day trip?

Worth it, but a poor substitute for staying. A day from Bari or Puglia gives you the Sassi by harsh midday light and the tour-bus crowds; the city's real hours are dawn, dusk and after dark, when the day-trippers have gone and the stone glows. Sleep here if you possibly can.

How do I get to Matera?

By road — Matera has no airport and, until recently, no mainline station. The usual approach is a one-hour drive or transfer from Bari airport; Matera Centrale links to Bari by regional line. Most hotels arrange transfers, and a car is useful only for the wider region, not the car-free historic centre.

Boutique Hotels in Matera, Italy

The Sassi and the Civita

The Sassi divide in two — the Barisano, more restored, and the Caveoso, rawer, around the cave churches of Piazza San Pietro Caveoso — with the Civita's summit between them, where the 13th-century cathedral commands the city's highest point. Beside it stands Palazzo Gattini, the Gattini Counts' palazzo of six centuries turned 20-room hotel, its spa cut into the building's ancient cisterns and the Sassi spread below its roof terrace. Beneath the modern town's main square hides the Palombaro Lungo, a cathedral-sized cistern carved in the rock — the quickest lesson in how this city engineered water for millennia.

Across the gravina: the Murgia and the cave churches

Cross the gravina — the canyon the city stands on — and the Murgia Materana park holds the older Matera: more than a hundred rupestrian churches carved by Byzantine and Benedictine monks, frescoes fading in the rock, and the belvedere at Murgia Timone with the definitive view back across the ravine to the stone city. A trail drops from the Sassi, crosses the stream and climbs the far rim; it takes an hour or so each way and turns the postcard into geography.

When to visit Matera

Spring and autumn are Matera's seasons — warm light, walkable hours, the stone glowing rather than baking. High summer is hot and shadeless on the rock, best handled with early mornings, long lunches and the evening passeggiata, though 2 July brings the Festa della Bruna, the city's tumultuous patronal feast, ending with the crowd tearing the processional cart to pieces. Winter is quiet and atmospheric, with living nativity scenes staged in the Sassi before Christmas.