Without a car
Basilicata by train
11 towns
Towns in this region where we confirmed an active station. Check the timetable before you go: a station on the map is not the same as a useful service.
Acerenza
Province: Potenza · 833 m
A walled ridge town at 833 meters in the north Lucanian hills, archbishopric since 1068 under a Romanesque cathedral begun in 1080.
Bernalda
Province: Matera · 127 m
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.
Irsina
Province: Matera · 548 m
A 548-meter Bradano-valley hill town, called Montepeloso until 1895, whose cathedral holds a Renaissance rarity.
Lagonegro
Province: Potenza · 666 m
A 666-meter town founded by Byzantine monks on a defensive promontory, split between a medieval castle village and a modern square below.
Maratea
Province: Potenza · 300 m
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 · 401 m
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 · 530 m
At 530 meters on volcanic slopes, first Norman capital of the south and seat of a landmark 1231 legal code issued from its castle.
Nova Siri
Province: Matera · 350 m
A 350-meter Ionian hill town with a Blue Flag beach nine kilometers below, near the site of the ancient Greek colony of Siris.
Pisticci
Province: Matera · 364 m
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 · 25 m
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.
Venosa
Province: Potenza · 415 m
Founded as Roman Venusia in 291 BC, birthplace of Horace, with an unfinished abbey built from amphitheater stones and a 1470 Aragonese castle.
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From elsewhere in Italy
Five more towns to discover
Visso
Province: Macerata
The northern Sibillini gate at 607 meters where the Nera meets the Ussita, holding one of two surviving manuscripts of Leopardi's L'Infinito.
Goriano Sicoli
Province: L'Aquila
At 720 meters in the Subequana valley, a medieval village drawn by M.C. Escher in 1929 keeps a May ritual folklorists trace to Demeter.
Ugento
Province: Lecce
A Messapian-Roman town five kilometers from the Ionian, where a Baroque castle sits on the walls of the ancient city of Ozan.
Fontanellato
Province: Parma
A Parma-plain town built around the Rocca Sanvitale, the moated fortress at its center.
Pescina
Province: L'Aquila
A Marsica town at 735 meters, on the rim of the drained Fucino basin, that lost five thousand of six thousand people in a single morning in 1915.