Matera - The Sassi

The city has been inhabited for more than ten thousand years. Matera's sassi, the ancient districts of cave dwellings cut directly into the tufa rock of a steep ravine, are not historical sites in the usual sense. They are not reconstructed or preserved for display. The city that grew along both walls of the Gravina gorge did so over millennia, each generation cutting deeper into the existing mass of stone, layering cisterns and churches and homes into the same limestone face that earlier inhabitants had already begun. The result is a city that reads vertically as much as horizontally, and that rewards duration over pace.

Stay

Sant'Angelo Luxury Resort in Sasso Caveoso converted an entire cave neighbourhood into accommodation, incorporating traditional cave houses and an adjacent palazzo. Some rooms sit deep inside the tufa, which produces a temperature and a silence that have nothing to do with insulation and everything to do with geological mass. Others open onto views across the gorge toward the rupestrian churches on the far plateau. The restaurant Regia Corte serves on a terrace above the ravine, which is the correct orientation for eating in Matera.

Palazzo Gattini, on Piazza Vittorio Veneto at the edge of the Civita plateau, is the more formal option. Original vaulted ceilings carry through the suites, and some retain ancient cisterns cut into the floor beneath glass. One suite has a private terrace pool positioned above the sassi, which is the kind of detail that only makes sense in this landscape.

Eat

Baccanti sits inside a vaulted stone cavern in the Sasso Caveoso, facing the cave churches of the district. It appears in the 2026 Michelin Guide Italia. The kitchen works with local and seasonal produce and the menu has a direct relationship to what the region produces rather than to the ambitions that sometimes accompany a Michelin listing. The setting alone would be sufficient for most restaurants. Fortunately it is not asked to stand in for the food.

Dimora Ulmo, in a restored palazzo in the upper town, runs three tasting menus assembled by Chef Michele Castelli from combinations of traditional Basilicatan cooking and contemporary technique, with a cellar of over six hundred wines. The summer terrace looks down over the sassi from the plateau level, reversing the usual perspective and producing a reading of the city that is harder to arrive at on foot.

Walk

Sasso Barisano and Sasso Caveoso divide along the Civita plateau at the centre of the historic city. Barisano is the more modified district, its cave fronts dressed with conventional facades that accumulated over centuries of alteration. Caveoso is less edited, with clearer evidence of how habitation worked at ground level and below it. Both reward time that is not organised around landmarks.

Across the Gravina gorge, the Murgia Materana plateau holds more than a hundred and fifty rupestrian churches carved by Byzantine monks between the eighth and thirteenth centuries. These are not buildings placed against rock. They are buildings shaped from it, with frescoed apses and barrel-vaulted naves cut directly into the limestone face. The road around the rim of the gorge at dusk, when the tufa changes register in the falling light, is not a detour from Matera. It is one of the reasons to be there.