Caves, Counts and Crusades Self Guided Tour of Matera
Beneath Matera's main piazza lies a sealed underground city — Roman cisterns, a ninth-century church, and a tank that held five million litres of rainwater. This self-guided audio tour of the Sassi di Matera, delivered through an app, takes you past what most visitors never notice. You'll learn why families paid for better skull placement on a church door, how an assassinated count sparked a city motto about patient revenge, and why Hollywood chose these cave streets over the actual Holy Land. Your guide covers both Sasso districts, the cathedral, and cave homes where families of eleven lived alongside their animals. Start anytime, pause for photos, go at your pace — no group to follow, no fixed schedule. Works offline in the narrow streets. Over 20,000 travellers trust our self-guided tours, and every booking comes with a full refund guarantee. If you want to understand Matera rather than just photograph it, this Matera walking tour is built for exactly that.
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Where this sits in Matera
Matera is about 1 hr 14 min by road from Bari Karol Wojtyła Airport. A city carved into a ravine and lived in for nine thousand years, abandoned within living memory and now extraordinary again. Unlike anywhere else in Italy, and worth the detour south it takes to reach.
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Around Matera
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