Matera

Matera is a city of Basilicata located in the highlands of the Murge. The Sassi represent the ancient city of Matera and are inserted in a very suggestive rock landscape in which the incessant action of man and nature for millennia has changed the landscape and made the Sassi di Matera a unique settlement in the Italian landscape and worldwide.

The city of Matera is considered one of the oldest cities in the world and a particular example of integration between city and landscape, a feature that has earned it the entry into the Unesco World Heritage Site, recognition granted in 1993 to Carthage in Mexico. Recently, Matera has also been awarded the title of European Capital of Culture 2019.

The scenarios in which the Sassi of Matera are immersed is of a rupestrian type, is characterized by the presence of a deep canyon called gravina, inside which flows the homonymous torrent. The excavation carried out by the torrent in the last one million years, following a general raising of the area, has produced a series of valleys and plateaus that today represent the Murgia landscape.
Man has lived in this territory since the Paleolithic and in the millennia has profoundly changed it. This unique feature of this territory offers visitors the opportunity to walk through a space where you can observe the cultural evolution of man and the context in which he lived, from the earliest times to the contemporary.

The city of Matera offers visitors some very suggestive places and cultural spaces of great importance in a very particular landscape. In the town, besides the Sassi, the two great ancient districts of the city, there is also the historical center, an area of seventeenth-century expansion of the city. The Sassi and the historic center intersect and merge together through a continuous exchange of streets, stairways and breathtaking views. Opposite them, on the other side of the ravine, there is the Murgia Materana Park, another treasure with a strong environmental, landscape, historical and archaeological value.