Matera is one of those places where the first view genuinely changes the mood of a day. You walk to the edge of the modern town, look down, and there are the Sassi: two hollows in the limestone filled with houses stacked on top of each other, their roofs serving as streets for the houses above, churches cut into the rock, staircases and alleys tumbling down to the edge of a deep ravine, the Gravina. Across the gorge, the Murgia plateau is riddled with caves and rock churches, some with Byzantine frescoes, used by monks and shepherds for over a thousand years. People have lived in these caves since prehistoric times, which makes Matera one of the oldest continuously inhabited settlements in the world.
The twentieth century nearly ended that. In 1945 Carlo Levi's book Christ Stopped at Eboli exposed the poverty of the region, and the Sassi, where families lived crowded in caves with their animals, without running water, became a national scandal. In the 1950s the government moved the inhabitants to new housing, and the Sassi were left empty for decades. Then came a long, slow revival: UNESCO listing in 1993, restoration, hotels and restaurants in the caves, and the title of European Capital of Culture in 2019. Film crews love it too; it stood in for Jerusalem in The Passion of the Christ and saw a famous car chase in No Time to Die.
For riders, Matera is a fine base for exploring Basilicata and Puglia, two regions with superb quiet roads. Inland, towards Montescaglioso, Craco's eerie ghost village and the clay badlands called calanchi, the roads twist through empty hills with almost no traffic, though surfaces can be rough and potholed. Towards Puglia, the Murgia plateau has long straight roads through stone walls, wheat fields and masserie, the fortified farmhouses of the south. Summer is hot and dry; spring and autumn are ideal.
Matera has fuel stations, shops and plenty of restaurants. The Sassi themselves are a pedestrian zone, steep and slippery, so park in the upper town. Try the famous bread of Matera, a tall loaf made with durum wheat, crapiata, a legume soup, and peperoni cruschi, crispy fried sweet peppers. In the evening, when the Sassi light up, it is one of the most magical sights in Italy.