Matera and the Wines of Vulture: The Ancient South

Matera is one of the oldest continuously inhabited urban settlements in the world, and one of the most extraordinary places in Italy. The wine produced on the volcanic slopes an hour to the north is one of the most powerful red wines in the peninsula. Together, they form a southern Italian itinerary with no equivalent.

Matera appears to most visitors as a surprise — the guide-books describe it, the photographs circulate widely online, and still the reality of the Sassi, seen for the first time from the Belvedere above the Gravina gorge, exceeds anything that prior familiarity with the image has prepared you for. Two great ravines of cave dwellings, rock-cut churches, ancient cisterns and narrow lanes, cut into the pale tufa of the Murge plateau and inhabited continuously since the Paleolithic — the Sassi constitute a three-thousand-year accumulation of human ingenuity applied to the specific challenge of building a city in a canyon of volcanic rock with no other building materials to hand and no architectural precedent to follow. The result is unlike anything in the Italian south, and unlike anything in Italy.

The standard Matera visit moves through the two historic Sassi districts — the Sasso Caveoso and the Sasso Barisano — following the main tourist paths, visiting the most accessible of the rupestrian churches and arriving at the viewpoint above the Gravina in time for the light that every photographer has already found. We begin where the standard visit ends.

Our programme starts in the early morning, with an archaeologist who has been working in the Parco della Murgia Materana for two decades, at the churches and cave complexes that are not on the tourist map — that require a key, a torch and knowledge of the specific access that the Parco authorities have granted to our guides. The Byzantine fresco cycles in these spaces, painted between the ninth and the thirteenth centuries by unknown artists working in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, are among the most compelling objects in southern Italian art.

The Rupestrian Churches: Byzantine Art in the Living Rock

More than a hundred and fifty rock-cut churches are catalogued within the Matera territory — their interiors decorated with fresco cycles of varying completeness and quality, their architectural forms ranging from simple cave chambers with carved altars to complex multi-apsed spaces with barrel vaults and painted programmes of considerable ambition. The Madonna delle Virtù — two superimposed churches connected by internal passages, with fresco decoration spanning four centuries from the tenth to the thirteenth — is the most architecturally complex. The Santa Barbara church, with its carved stone altar and its single, extraordinary surviving fresco of the Byzantine Madonna, is the most intimate. We arrange access to both, and to several other churches in the Murgia park not accessible to independent visitors, through our established relationship with the Parco archaeologists.

Aglianico del Vulture: The Barolo of the South

An hour north of Matera, the extinct volcano of Monte Vulture rises to 1,326 metres above the Basilicata interior, its crater containing two small volcanic lakes of still, dark water, its flanks forested with chestnut and its lower slopes planted, on basalt and volcanic ash soils of extraordinary mineral richness, with the Aglianico grape variety that has been grown here since the ancient Greeks colonised this coast. Aglianico del Vulture DOCG — fermented to dryness, aged for a minimum of two years in oak, with considerable potential for a decade or more of bottle development — produces, at its finest from the communes of Barile, Rionero and Venosa, a red wine of formidable tannic structure, dark fruit concentration and volcanic mineral depth that has earned the comparison to Barolo through the quality of its evidence rather than the ambition of its producers. We arrange private visits to the leading estates — including producers whose cellars are carved into the basalt itself, where the constant cool temperature of the rock provides conditions ideal for the long ageing that Aglianico requires — for private tastings with the winemakers.

The Calanchi and Carlo Levi's Landscape

Carlo Levi, the Turinese painter and anti-fascist writer exiled to the remote Lucanian village of Aliano in 1935, transformed his experience of Basilicata's peasant culture into Christ Stopped at Eboli — a book that brought the deep south to the attention of a reading public that had assumed its existence in the abstract and been unwilling to examine it in the specific. Aliano sits on a ridge above the calanchi — the pale grey clay badlands, eroded by rain into sharp ridges and deep gullies, that give the Basilicata interior its quality of a lunar surface seen from a distance — in a landscape of strange, severe beauty that is among the most unexpected in southern Italy. A half-day excursion from Matera through the calanchi to Aliano and the small Levi museum, followed by a lunch in a working farm kitchen in the Lucanian countryside, is one of the most unusual and most genuinely moving cultural experiences we design in the Italian south.

To walk the Sassi at dawn with an archaeologist who can read the three thousand years of human ingenuity visible in the rock face above you is to understand, in a way no museum can explain, what the southern Italian civilisations achieved in the absence of the resources that the north took for granted.

The Essentials

Best season: April–June and September–October for the landscape; year-round for the Sassi

Signature experience: Private rupestrian church visits in the Murgia park; Aglianico del Vulture vertical tasting in a basalt cellar

Stay: Cave hotels in the Sassi Caveoso or Barisano (Sextantio Le Grotte della Civita; Palazzo Gattini)

Combine with: Alberobello and the Trulli country (90 min east), Lecce (two hours south-east)

Every journey we design is entirely bespoke — crafted around your preferences,your pace, and your desire for the exceptional.

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