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.
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.
Stigliano
Province: Matera
At 909 meters on the northern edge of the Lucanian calanchi, the highest commune in Matera province, Basilicata's capital under the Spanish Medina from 1556.
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.

The Sunday letter

The 1,000 Italian towns most travelers skip.

Every Sunday we send one letter. The week's town, what is worth eating there, and when to turn up. It is free, and you can leave whenever you like.

Substack sends a confirmation link to your inbox. The signup finishes when it’s clicked.

From elsewhere in Italy

Five more towns to discover