Matera Ape Calesse: The Most Charming Way to Discover the Sassi
A Matera Ape Calesse tour is the most characterful and most enjoyable way to explore a city whose streets, staircases, and cave dwellings were never designed for conventional vehicles. The Ape Calesse — a converted three-wheeled Piaggio Ape fitted with a small open carriage — navigates the narrow lanes and viewpoints of the sassi with a combination of nimbleness and charm that immediately sets it apart from walking tours and conventional guided visits. The driver, who is also the guide, moves through the oldest inhabited parts of the city at a pace that allows passengers to look, photograph, and ask questions without the pressure of keeping up with a group or following a fixed timetable. For first-time visitors to Matera, the Ape Calesse tour provides the orientation that makes every subsequent walk through the sassi more rewarding; for those who have already explored on foot, it reveals viewpoints and connections between different parts of the city that the pedestrian network alone does not easily yield.
Matera and the Sassi: A UNESCO City
Matera is one of the most extraordinary cities in the world — a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1993 and the European Capital of Culture in 2019, its reputation now international after decades of obscurity during which it was regarded within Italy as a symbol of southern poverty rather than ancient civilization. The sassi — the cave dwellings carved from the tufa of the Gravina gorge — were inhabited continuously from the Palaeolithic period until the forced evacuation of the population in the 1950s, ordered by the Italian government under pressure from Carlo Levi’s descriptions of the living conditions in his memoir Cristo si è fermato a Eboli. The evacuation that was intended to modernize the south preserved the sassi in a state that subsequent decades have transformed into one of the most remarkable urban conservation projects in Europe: the cave dwellings restored as hotels, restaurants, and private residences, the rock churches reopened, the ancient urban landscape repopulated by a community that has rediscovered the value of what it was once forced to abandon.
The Route: Sassi Barisano, Sassi Caveoso, and the Belvedere
The Ape Calesse tour typically covers both of Matera’s main sassi districts — the Sasso Barisano and the Sasso Caveoso — as well as the belvedere viewpoints from the opposite rim of the Gravina gorge that offer the panoramic views of the cave city that appear in every photograph and postcard. The Sasso Barisano, facing north, is the more restored and more visited of the two, its lanes lined with boutique hotels and restaurants housed in converted cave dwellings. The Sasso Caveoso, facing south toward the gorge, is quieter and less developed, its rock churches — Madonna dell’Idris, Santa Lucia alle Malve, Santa Barbara — accessible by foot from the Ape’s stopping points along the route. The view from the Belvedere di Murgia Timone, across the gorge on the far side, gives the most complete panorama of the sassi and the Gravina below — the perspective from which the full scale and antiquity of the cave city is most clearly understood.
The Rock Churches of the Gravina
The Gravina gorge that frames the sassi on its eastern side contains dozens of rock-cut churches carved by Byzantine monks between the 8th and 13th centuries, their interiors frescoed with programs of early Christian and medieval imagery that represent the most complete surviving record of rupestrian religious art in southern Italy. The Ape Calesse tour introduces visitors to the most accessible of these churches from the road level above, and the combination of vehicle tour and subsequent exploration on foot — descending into the gorge on the paths that connect the main viewpoints with the valley floor — covers the full depth of what Matera offers in a single day.
Matera on a Basilicata Self-Drive
The Matera Ape Calesse tour is the natural introduction to a stay in the city that can extend to the Crypt of Original Sin and connect into a broader self-guided tour of Basilicata that includes the Dolomites Lucane and the Tibetan bridge. Explore the full Basilicata region to plan your itinerary, then contact our team to start building your trip, or learn more about how a self-guided tour works.
