Matera

Matera is about an hour’s drive from the Agriturismo, a place that fascinates and engages visitors for its uniqueness, a place that has been defined several times as magnetic for its ability to amaze and give sensations that are never forgotten. It is considered a cave capital in the Mediterranean and one of the rare examples in the world where it is possible to gather the testimonies of a cave civilization.

In 1993 UNESCO declared the Sassi di Matera and part of the territory of the Murgia Materana Park as a World Heritage Site due to the exceptional cultural value present, the first Italian UNESCO site in the South.
The Sassi di Matera alternate primordial cave settlements with cave and hypogean churches, stately buildings, arches, balconies unique for the style and the particularity of the context. A historical and artistic condensate of urban spaces carved out of tuff.

On 17 October 2014 Matera was designated European Capital of Culture for 2019.

It is a city with an ancient history that has continuously crossed many millennia of human evolution: from the stone age, to that of metals, the late ancient, the Middle Ages continuing to the present day.

During this long history Matera has undergone profound transformations while maintaining a characteristic aspect strongly linked to the natural context of the surrounding murgia. This combination of civilization and nature still offers itself with a spectacular landscape made up of both the original urban nucleus, the Sassi di Matera, and the surrounding context made of valleys, canyons and plateaus sculpted over time by the Gravina stream and today largely falling in the Murgia Materana Park.

The most common feeling is that of being within a landscape of another era, not surprisingly, some great masters of cinema have chosen to set their films in this evocative setting.

Matera is at the center of an incredible rock landscape that preserves a great heritage of culture and traditions, and is the venue for exhibitions of great national and international prestige.

It is a city with a fascinating and complex history: a border town, of contrasts, of competition and fusion of different landscapes, civilizations and cultures. From the rock civilization developed from prehistory to the early Middle Ages with the advent of Byzantine and Eastern culture, the advent of the Normans, the systematic attempt to reduce the rock city to the rules of European city culture: from Romanesque to the Renaissance, in the Baroque, the last eight centuries of construction and finishing of the city have attempted to shape, overcome the natural resistance of the pre-existing rock habitat, resulting in urban architecture and arrangements of particular quality and originality.

Matera offers its visitors the fascinating sensation of discovering the path of an original cultural evolution, made of traces and masterpieces, of large and small testimonies, sometimes apparently humble, other times cultured expressions, is the long and exciting journey that has characterized the history of Matera.