Region
Basilicata
Basilicata's 31 towns in our catalogue split across the Potenza and Matera provinces; 9 carry the Borghi più belli d'Italia designation.
31 towns · highest: Pietrapertosa 1,088m · smallest: Guardia Perticara 517 people
31 of 31 towns
31 of 31 towns
Accettura
Province: Matera
A 770-meter village in the Gallipoli Cognato park where, each Pentecost, a Turkey oak is married to a holly tree.
Acerenza
Province: Potenza
A walled ridge town at 833 meters in the north Lucanian hills, archbishopric since 1068 under a Romanesque cathedral begun in 1080.
Aliano
Province: Matera
The clay-hill village at 555 meters above the Agri valley where Carlo Levi served his 1935 exile and is buried in the cemetery.
Bernalda
Province: Matera
A 127-meter hill town between the Bradano and Basento, Francis Ford Coppola's ancestral home, holding the Magna Graecia columns of the Tavole Palatine.
Calvello
Province: Potenza
A 730-meter ceramic town working clay since 1200, when Benedictines from Faenza brought the wheel south.
Castelmezzano
Province: Potenza
A medieval village wedged into sandstone teeth at 750 meters, linked to Pietrapertosa by a 1,452-meter zipline since 2007.
Craco
Province: Matera
A medieval ghost town on a clay cliff, emptied by landslide and earthquake, now walked only on a guided path.
Grottole
Province: Matera
A hilltop borgo at 481 meters between the Bradano and Basento, where six hundred empty houses outnumber residents in the centro storico.
Guardia Perticara
Province: Potenza
The stone village at 678 meters above the Sauro valley, rebuilt block by block in Gorgoglione sandstone after the 1980 earthquake.
Irsina
Province: Matera
A 548-meter Bradano-valley hill town, called Montepeloso until 1895, whose cathedral holds a Renaissance rarity.
Lagonegro
Province: Potenza
A 666-meter town founded by Byzantine monks on a defensive promontory, split between a medieval castle village and a modern square below.
Latronico
Province: Potenza
A mountain town at 888 meters on the northern edge of the Pollino, with two prehistoric thermal springs at the Calda hamlet below.
Maratea
Province: Potenza
Basilicata's only commune on the Tyrrhenian, thirty-two kilometers of rocky coast overlooked by a marble Christ raised inland in 1965.
Matera
Province: Matera
Cave dwellings carved into limestone since the Paleolithic, called the shame of Italy in the 1950s and made European Capital of Culture in 2019.
Melfi
Province: Potenza
At 530 meters on volcanic slopes, first Norman capital of the south and seat of a landmark 1231 legal code issued from its castle.
Miglionico
Province: Matera
A hilltop borgo at 461 meters above the Bradano, the seven-tower castle that gave the 1485 Conspiracy of the Barons its hall.
Nova Siri
Province: Matera
A 350-meter Ionian hill town with a Blue Flag beach nine kilometers below, near the site of the ancient Greek colony of Siris.
Pietrapertosa
Province: Potenza
Basilicata's highest commune at 1,088 meters, built into the Lucanian Dolomites with a Saracen rock-cut fortress and a 1,400-meter zipline to Castelmezzano.
Pisticci
Province: Matera
A hill town on eroded clay above the Ionian, rebuilt in three hundred identical white houses after survivors refused to leave the ground the landslide had passed over.
Policoro
Province: Matera
An Ionian-coast town built on the ruins of the Greek polis of Heraclea, with a national museum devoted to the city's finds and a nature reserve running the country's documented sea turtle nesting program.
Rivello
Province: Potenza
A 479-meter ridge above the Noce valley where Lombards and Byzantines lived side by side, holding Latin and Greek rites until the seventeenth century.
Rotonda
Province: Potenza
The Pollino park's Lucanian gateway: a 3,171-resident borgo at 626m on the Basilicata/Calabria border, headquarters for the Parco Nazionale del Pollino, Italy's largest national park, with the Loricato pine forests immediately above town.
Rotondella
Province: Matera
A 2,400-resident Lucanian borgo on a 576m hilltop, its medieval streets ringed concentrically around the summit above the Metapontino plain.
San Fele
Province: Potenza
A stone village at 872 meters between two peaks, where a 969 fortress and ten waterfalls along the Bradano still define the place.
San Mauro Forte
Province: Matera
A 540-meter Lucanian hill town built around a surviving Norman tower, where the Sagra dei Campanacci on 16 January wakes the village with cowbells.
Sant'Angelo Le Fratte
Province: Potenza
A village of 1,295 in the Melandro valley whose house fronts are painted with trompe l'oeil murals, so that a real balcony sits beside a painted one and a woman in old Lucanian dress leans out of a wall.
Sasso di Castalda
Province: Potenza
A 949-meter village in the Lucanian Apennines whose emigrants produced the engineer who launched Apollo 11, now crossed by a 300-meter Tibetan footbridge.
Terranova di Pollino
Province: Potenza
At 926 meters on the Lucanian side of the Pollino, the gateway into Italy's largest national park, home of the Sarmento red potato.
Valsinni
Province: Matera
A 1,344-resident Lucanian borgo on a hilltop above the Sinni river, where a 16th-century Renaissance poet was murdered by her brothers in 1545, marked today by a Touring Club Bandiera Arancione and a place inside the Pollino park.
Venosa
Province: Potenza
Founded as Roman Venusia in 291 BC, birthplace of Horace, with an unfinished abbey built from amphitheater stones and a 1470 Aragonese castle.
Viggiano
Province: Potenza
A 975-meter Val d'Agri ridge town, home of the Black Madonna of Lucania and the Italian folk harp, on Europe's largest onshore oil field.
From elsewhere in Italy
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Fonni
Province: Nuoro
The highest village in Sardinia at 1,000 meters on the Gennargentu, with ski lifts climbing above the town and the Madonna dei Martiri sanctuary at its edge.
Lerici
Province: La Spezia
A fishing harbour under a Pisan-Genoese castle, with the frazione of Tellaro hanging over the rocks at the commune's southern edge.
Posada
Province: Nuoro
The capital of the Baronia, a 3,000-person village on a 71-meter rock with a 13th-century tower over the valley.
Sadali
Province: Sud Sardegna
A Barbagia di Seulo borgo at 750 meters with the only waterfall in Sardegna that drops through the inhabited centre.
Cassano delle Murge
Province: Bari
A Murge foothills town at 341 meters at the gate of the Alta Murgia park, with the 1,300-hectare Foresta Mercadante mostly inside its territory.