The 9 best hidden hill towns in Basilicata
Basilicata is a region of ridges. Towns here climb rock that offers no flat ground, so houses press against each other in tufo and local sandstone, streets turn into stairs, and balconies hang over gullies of pale clay that the rain keeps carving. The land below is planted with durum wheat, olives and cherry orchards, and the cooking follows it: peperoni cruschi crumbled over pasta, lucanica sausage, broad beans with wild chicory, pecorino aged in caves. Late spring brings green to the calanchi badlands before summer bleaches them; autumn brings the pig, the new oil and chestnut fairs in the Lucanian Apennines. Nights are cool even in August, because almost nothing here sits low.
Most people who come to Basilicata come for Matera, and with reason: the Sassi are among the most extraordinary urban landscapes in Europe, a whole town quarried out of the rock it stands on. Since the UNESCO listing and the run of films shot there, the cave hotels book out months ahead and the main streets move at a shuffle in July. Coach parties arrive from Bari and Puglia for the afternoon, then leave. It is worth the visit, but it is not the whole region, and the crowd rarely gets further than the ravine viewpoints.
The same rock, the same clay, the same food carry on for a long way past Matera. Inland Basilicata is full of small hill settlements on ground too steep to spread, some of them half-emptied by emigration, some with Norman castles, Roman ruins or Aragonese churches still holding the high point. These are the towns in this list. Fewer people go, the roads are narrow, and the reward is a version of Lucania that still runs on its own timetable.
Of the 31 communes we have mapped in Basilicata, 12 qualify as hill towns: each is an inland hill settlement built on ground too steep to spread. This list is the hidden ones, 9 in all, ordered smallest first. The smallest, Craco, has 620 residents.
If you are still choosing, we have also written The 9 best hill towns in the province of Matera and The best olive oil towns in Basilicata.
Craco
Why visit Craco
The cliff rises above the Cavone valley, west of the Ionian plain, and the old village on top was abandoned in stages rather than all at once. Heavy autumn rains in 1963 set off a landslide that tore through the slope below and condemned several hundred buildings; the 1,800 residents were evacuated the following year to a planned settlement three kilometers down on the plain.
A 1972 flood worsened the failure in the years that followed, and the earthquake of 1980 finished what the landslide had started. Nothing has been rebuilt on the hilltop since.
The two halves of Craco now sit in a fixed relationship: the ruined village above, empty and fenced into a walking route, and the resettled town below, where the population that once lived on the cliff has continued its life on the plain for six hundred people and counting. The abandonment was not a single event but three separate failures of the same ground, and the empty hilltop is what that slow, repeated collapse left standing.
What to see in Craco
- Craco Vecchia. The abandoned hilltop is accessible only by guided tour with hard hat, walked through marked routes past the ruined buildings.
- Torre Normanna. The tower stands at the summit of the marked tour route, the tallest point of the ruins and the first thing visible from the valley below.
- Chiesa Madre di San Nicola. Gutted but still upright on the marked tour route, its bare walls and open roof are among the most photographed ruins on the walk.
How to get to Craco
There is no station we could confirm here, so this one means driving. Taranto is roughly 77 minutes away by road.
Our tip
April through October is the tour season. The guided routes through Craco Vecchia run on a fixed schedule from the Peschiera ticket office; July and August can hit forty degrees on the exposed clay cliff, and the tour shifts to early morning and late afternoon to make the heat manageable. May, June, September and October are the best months for the route and the light, with the surrounding calanchi turning gold in October.
Aliano
Why visit Aliano
Aliano sits on a clay hill at 555 meters in the southern Matera province, above the Agri river valley and the Sauro stream. The town is surrounded by calanchi, the eroded badlands of bare clay carved by rainwater into ridges and pinnacles, the landscape that became the visual signature of Carlo Levi's exile.
Levi, a Turin doctor, painter and anti-fascist, was confined here from 1935 to 1936 under Mussolini's regime. The book he wrote afterward, Cristo si è fermato a Eboli, published in 1945, gave the village the invented name Gagliano and turned the south's poverty into national literature.
The title comes from a local saying: that Christ stopped short at Eboli, in Campania, and never reached this far. Levi was buried in the village cemetery at his request in 1975.
The house where he was held is now a museum, and the surrounding territory is run as a Parco Letterario. The annual Festival La Luna e i Calanchi, founded by poet Franco Arminio, fills the village every August with readings and music on the bare clay ridges.
What to see in Aliano
- Casa di Carlo Levi. The house where Levi was held in confino from 1935 to 1936, preserved with his paintings, books and personal effects, now the heart of the Parco Letterario.
- Tomba di Carlo Levi. Levi's grave in the village cemetery, where he asked to be buried in 1975 alongside the contadini he wrote about.
- Calanchi di Aliano. Eroded clay badlands surrounding the village, carved by rainwater into bare ridges and pinnacles, a protected geomorphological landscape.
How to get to Aliano
There is no station we could confirm here, so this one means driving. Taranto is roughly 112 minutes away by road.
Our tip
April through June and September into October are the months when the calanchi hold their best light: the bare clay turns silver at dawn and gold at sunset, and the air is clear enough to see down the Agri valley to the Ionian. July and August push past thirty-five degrees and the village empties between two and six in the afternoon, though the Luna e i Calanchi festival in the second half of August packs the streets every night. November through March is quiet and often raw, the calanchi softened by mist.
San Mauro Forte
Why visit San Mauro Forte
San Mauro Forte sits at 540 meters in the western Matera hills, fifty-five kilometers from the Sassi and forty from Pietrapertosa. The Timponi site, with eighth-century BC remains and fourth-century BC tombs, places the area inside the Lucanian prehistoric network.
The current settlement was founded around 1060 in the Norman period and takes its name from a Benedictine monastery dedicated to Saint Maurus. The Torre Normanna, the cylindrical defensive tower in the main piazza, is the surviving element of the Norman-Swabian castle, later rebuilt by the Angevins.
The Chiesa di Santa Maria Assunta of 1553 preserves a sixteenth-century processional cross. The town's calendar is dominated by the Sagra dei Campanacci on the eve of Sant'Antonio Abate, on 16 January, when men strap belts of cowbells around their waists and walk the streets at dusk in a transhumance rite that predates the church and was kept alive by the shepherding economy.
The town carries Città dell'Olio status: olive groves cover much of the commune.
What to see in San Mauro Forte
- Torre Normanna. Cylindrical Norman tower in the main piazza, the surviving element of the Norman-Swabian castle, rebuilt by the Angevins.
- Chiesa di Santa Maria Assunta. Mother church built in 1553 inside the medieval centre, preserving a sixteenth-century astile cross and an eighteenth-century canvas.
- Chiesa e Convento dell'Annunziata. Franciscan complex begun in the late fifteenth century, with the convent attached to the church of the Annunciation.
How to get to San Mauro Forte
There is no station we could confirm here, so this one means driving. Taranto is roughly 118 minutes away by road.
Our tip
April through June and September through October are the comfortable months in the Matera interior, with green hills and dry evenings. July and August touch thirty-five degrees and the centro storico empties between four and seven. The standout date is 16 January, the eve of Sant'Antonio Abate, when the Sagra dei Campanacci fills the alleys with bell-walkers at dusk and visitors come specifically for the sound.
Accettura
Why visit Accettura
Accettura lies between the Matera hills and the park's western edge, inside the Parco Regionale Gallipoli Cognato e Piccole Dolomiti Lucane, a protected area it shares with Pietrapertosa and Castelmezzano next door. The village's own calendar runs on a separate rhythm: from the octave of Easter to Pentecost, the year builds toward the marriage of two trees.
The oak, u' Masc', comes down from the forest above the village on Ascension Day; the holly, u' Cima, is cut in the park forest the Sunday after. Yoked oxen drag both trunks into the village, where they are joined and raised as one pole in the main piazza, thirty-five meters high.
Ethnographers read the rite as a Lombard arboreal cult laid over the newer cult of the patron saint, the two now inseparable in practice though centuries apart in origin. For the rest of the year the village returns to its ordinary size and quiet, a small stone settlement whose one loud week of the year is also its oldest.
What to see in Accettura
- Bosco di Montepiano. Forest above the village where the oak destined for the rite is chosen on the first Sunday after Easter and felled there on Ascension Day.
- Parco Regionale Gallipoli Cognato. Park land stretching to Pietrapertosa and Castelmezzano and the Lucanian Dolomites, with the Cima holly forest at its core.
- Chiesa di San Nicola di Bari. Mother church in the centro storico, the religious anchor of the village outside the Maggio period.
How to get to Accettura
There is no station we could confirm here, so this one means driving. Salerno is roughly 122 minutes away by road.
Our tip
The Maggio rite covers six weeks from the octave of Easter to Pentecost, with the oak felled on Ascension Day and the trees joined and raised in the piazza at Pentecost weekend. May and June are the visiting peak. April, July and September are quiet, green and walkable, with Gallipoli Cognato trails open and evenings cool at 770 meters.
Grottole
Why visit Grottole
Grottole sits at 481 meters on a hill between the Bradano and Basento rivers, seventeen kilometers from Matera. The current population is around two thousand on paper, but the centro storico has roughly three hundred residents and six hundred empty houses.
At its centre stands the Chiesa Diruta, the medieval church of Saints Luke and Julian, roofless since the seventeenth century and photographed more often than it is prayed in. The Norman-era Castello di Grottole, with a central watchtower, sits on the high point.
The town drew international attention in 2019 when Airbnb and the NGO Wonder Grottole launched the Italian Sabbatical, a three-month volunteer programme offering five people the chance to live in the village free, in partnership with Fondazione Matera 2019. Around 280,000 people applied for the five slots.
The point of the experiment was not tourism but repopulation. Honey, anchored by the Città del Miele designation, comes from the surrounding scrub and pastures and is the village's signature product.
What to see in Grottole
- Chiesa Diruta. Medieval church of Saints Luke and Julian, roofless since the seventeenth century, the most photographed ruin in the centro storico.
- Castello di Grottole. Norman-era fortress on the hilltop with a central watchtower, the high point of the village and the orientation marker visible from the surrounding valleys.
- Centro storico. Stone village with around six hundred empty houses and three hundred residents, the Wonder Grottole programme working to restore and repopulate it house by house.
How to get to Grottole
There is no station we could confirm here, so this one means driving. Bari is roughly 93 minutes away by road.
Our tip
April through June and September into October are the months when Grottole's hill feels right. The light slants across the Chiesa Diruta and the empty stone houses; the air is mild and the surrounding fields are green. July and August push past thirty-five degrees and the centro storico empties between two and seven in the afternoon.
Miglionico
Why visit Miglionico
Miglionico sits at 461 meters on a hill between the Bradano and Basento rivers, twelve kilometers from Matera in the central-eastern Matera province. The town is dominated by the Castello del Malconsiglio, the Castle of the Bad Council, built in the eighth or ninth century, enlarged in 1110 and again in the fifteenth century, with seven towers in a parallelogram plan: some square and oldest, two double towers, and circular towers at the corners.
The castle gave its name and its hall to the Conspiracy of the Barons in 1485, when the Sanseverino and Del Balzo families convened here to plot the overthrow of King Ferdinand I of Aragon. The room where they met is still called the Sala del Malconsiglio, the Hall of Bad Counsel; the conspiracy failed and the families were destroyed.
Miglionico is one of the Borghi più belli d'Italia and carries the Città dell'Olio designation for the olive groves on the surrounding slopes.
What to see in Miglionico
- Castello del Malconsiglio. Castle with seven towers in a parallelogram plan, built in the eighth or ninth century, expanded in 1110 and the fifteenth century, site of the 1485 Conspiracy of the Barons.
- Sala del Malconsiglio. The hall inside the castle where the Sanseverino and Del Balzo families plotted against Ferdinand I of Aragon in 1485; the room from which the castle takes its name.
- Chiesa Madre di Santa Maria Maggiore. Mother church on the high point of the village, with a polyptych by Cima da Conegliano dated 1499, one of Basilicata's finest Renaissance works.
How to get to Miglionico
There is no station we could confirm here, so this one means driving. Bari is roughly 92 minutes away by road.
Our tip
April through June and September into October are the months when Miglionico's ridge feels right. The Castello del Malconsiglio against the Bradano and Basento valleys is at its best in slanting light. July and August push past thirty-five degrees; the centro storico empties between two and seven in the afternoon, though the castle stays open with summer hours.
Rivello
Why visit Rivello
Rivello sits at 479 meters on a ridge above the Noce valley, twenty kilometers inland from Maratea and the Tyrrhenian. The town was disputed between Lombards and Byzantines after the fall of Velia, and its name is read by some as Re-Velia, the place where Velian refugees regrouped.
Both peoples settled here and never fully separated: the ridge organized itself into an upper town and a lower town, and for centuries each pole kept its own church, its own clergy, and its own rite, meeting at the market but not at the altar. The eighteenth century was Rivello's prosperous moment, judging from the parish archives and the stone houses that climb the ridge from that period, including the Baroque work layered onto older Greek-rite foundations in the lower town.
The Pollino park boundary runs nearby, and the belvedere at Passo la Colla looks down on the Gulf of Policastro, a reminder that the ridge, for all its inland feel, sits a short distance from the coast it once helped populate. What the town amounts to is a single street holding two histories that ran side by side for the better part of a millennium before finally merging.
What to see in Rivello
- Convento di Sant'Antonio da Padova. Sixteenth-century Franciscan complex built around a cloister, its frescoes by Giovanni Todisco and Giovanni De Gregorio covering the cloister walls and refectory.
- Chiesa di Santa Maria Maggiore. Upper-town church, plainer in its stonework than its lower-town counterpart, standing at the pole of the ridge that held the Latin congregation.
- Chiesa di San Nicola dei Greci. Lower-town church with Byzantine architectural elements still legible beneath an eighteenth-century reorganisation of the interior.
How to get to Rivello
There is no station we could confirm here, so this one means driving. Salerno is roughly 88 minutes away by road.
Our tip
April through June is the comfortable window, when the Noce valley turns green and the convent frescoes can be viewed without queues. September and October are dry and gold. July and August push toward thirty-five degrees on the ridge, hotter still in the valley, and locals retreat to the Tyrrhenian or the Pollino slopes nearby.
Irsina
Why visit Irsina
Irsina sits on the border between Basilicata and Puglia, twenty-nine kilometers from Matera, where the Bradano flows below and separates the town from the Murge plateau. The historic centre occupies a tufaceous spur riddled beneath with rupestrian caves and cisterns, a settlement built as much downward as up.
The town's civic and religious history turned on a single commission. Raised to an archbishop's seat in 1452, Montepeloso saw its priest, Roberto de Mabilia, then working as an ecclesiastical notary in Padua, commission a young sculptor from that city to carve a Sant'Eufemia for his home town the following year.
The statue he sent back carries the old town's own coat of arms, the triple mountain and castle, in the saint's hand, binding the imported Renaissance object to the local heraldry it was made to honor. A hill town on a river border ended up holding, by way of a notary's commission to a distant workshop, a devotional statue that ties its Puglia-facing geography to a Veneto hand and its pre-1895 name to the stone the saint holds.
What to see in Irsina
- Cattedrale di Santa Maria Assunta. Thirteenth-century cathedral on the highest point of the borgo. Raised to an archbishop's seat in 1452, it holds the statue as its principal treasure.
- Sant'Eufemia di Mantegna. Carved from Nanto stone of the Veneto, the saint stands with a lion at her side. Identified as Andrea Mantegna's own work in 1996, confirmed by later scholars.
- Ipogei e cantine rupestri. Underground cellars, cisterns and rupestrian rooms cut into the tufaceous spur, reaching beneath the historic centre's alleys and houses.
How to get to Irsina
There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Bari is roughly 86 minutes away by road.
Our tip
April through June and September through October are the comfortable months in the Bradano hills, with green wheat fields and dry evenings at 548 meters. July and August touch the mid-thirties on the open spur but stay cool in the rupestrian cellars beneath the centro. November through March is quiet, the cathedral keeps shorter hours and the Mantegna can usually be seen without a queue.
Venosa
Why visit Venosa
Venosa sits at 415 meters in the Vulture hills, ninety kilometers east of Salerno. The Romans founded Venusia here in 291 BC as a colony on the Appian Way, and it became the birthplace of Quintus Horatius Flaccus, the poet Horace, in 65 BC.
The Parco Archeologico preserves a Roman amphitheater, the baths, and mosaic floors, alongside the so-called Casa di Orazio. Above the ruins stands the Abbazia della Santissima Trinità, an eleventh-century Benedictine complex begun in 1059, with its walls built from blocks salvaged out of the Roman amphitheater next door.
The Incompiuta, the unfinished thirteenth-century cathedral expansion immediately behind the abbey, is roofless and visibly stitched together from Roman fragments. The town centre is dominated by the Castello di Pirro del Balzo, built in 1470 on the foundations of an earlier cathedral and modelled on the Maschio Angioino in Naples.
Venosa is at the heart of the Aglianico del Vulture DOC and DOCG zone, the great red of southern Italy, grown on the volcanic slopes of nearby Monte Vulture.
What to see in Venosa
- Abbazia della Santissima Trinità. Benedictine abbey of 1059 with walls built from blocks of the adjacent Roman amphitheater, the spiritual centre of Norman Venosa.
- Incompiuta. Roofless thirteenth-century cathedral expansion behind the abbey of Santissima Trinità, abandoned mid-build, visibly assembled from Roman spolia.
- Castello di Pirro del Balzo. Quadrangular Aragonese castle of 1470 with corner towers, built on the foundations of the earlier cathedral, modelled on Castel Nuovo in Naples.
How to get to Venosa
There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Foggia is roughly 70 minutes away by road.
Our tip
April through June is the green window in the Vulture, with cool evenings and the archaeological park empty in the mornings. September and October are dry and gold, the Aglianico harvest runs into November, and the Cantina di Venosa cellars are open for tastings. July and August reach the mid-thirties; visitors retreat to the abbey shade and the wine cellars. Fiera sapori del Sud falls in May.
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