Matera

Two cave districts, Sasso Barisano to the north and Sasso Caveoso to the south, split around the cathedral hill. One house's roof is the next one's street, so you walk over stairs and rooftops. After dark, lit up, the whole slope looks like a nativity scene.

A cave house furnished as it was before its residents left in the 1950s. Bed and kitchen share one room, and inside the same cave are the corner for the donkey and pig and a cistern for rainwater. Here you understand why everyone was moved out.

From this plateau across the ravine the Sassi face you head-on, and cave churches carved by monks dot the rocks around. The route down from Sasso Caveoso to the ravine floor and over a swaying bridge back up is steep and has no shade.

A church half carved, half built atop the crag over Sasso Caveoso, with medieval frescoes surviving in the inner cave. From the steps in front you look down the ravine to the plateau opposite. One combined ticket covers it and other Sassi rock churches.

A huge rainwater cistern hidden directly under Piazza Vittorio Veneto in the centre, about 15m deep. It watered the city until the Apulian aqueduct arrived. Drained now, it is seen from walkways along its walls, and entry is by guided visit only.

A 13th-century Apulian Romanesque church on the crest between the two Sassi, its bell tower visible from either cave district. It reopened in 2016 after long restoration, and inside, 17th-century gilding makes it look nothing like the outside.

Modern sculpture laid out through a 17th-century palazzo and the cave rooms dug into the rock beneath it. Bronzes and plasters stand against cool, dark cave walls, nothing like an ordinary gallery. It makes a good refuge at midday in high summer.

A cave on a ravine slope some 20 minutes' drive out, whose 8th- to 9th-century frescoes of Creation and the Fall earned it the name Sistine Chapel of rock churches. Guides take groups in at set times only, so it needs booking; you drive to the meeting point.

A rope bridge hung over the Gravina stream on the ravine floor below Sasso Caveoso, a shortcut across to the Murgia Timone side. The stair down to it is long and the return is all uphill; bring ample water. Wet weather makes the limestone treacherous.

A hilltop village southwest of Matera, abandoned outright after a landslide in 1963 drove its people out. Buildings are crumbling, so you cannot enter alone; visits go with a guide and a helmet. The drive takes about an hour.

A 17th-century church on a narrow square where the Sasso Caveoso ends at the ravine's lip. Over the railing the Gravina gorge falls away, and Santa Maria de Idris perches on the crag next door. At sunset the cave mouths across the gorge sink into shadow.

A 17th-century seminary turned into Basilicata's museum of medieval and modern art. Its biggest room holds Carlo Levi's vast Lucania 61, painted for the 1961 Turin exhibition. Levi's writing on Matera's poverty helped bring about the emptying of the Sassi.

Opened in 1911 in the old convent of Santa Chiara, it began with finds the local doctor Domenico Ridola dug from the Murgia plateau. Neolithic pottery through to Greek vases runs in order. Visit before the Sassi to grasp how long people have lived here.

In 1501 Count Tramontano began a castle on the high ground above Matera and never finished it. His heavy taxes got him killed by furious citizens in 1514, and building stopped. Three round towers stand alone, and the hill around them is a public park.

A baroque church of 1747 whose door panels and stone carving swarm with skulls and bones. The point was to remind the living to pray for souls of the dead. Its address is Via Ridola, right by the museum.

A hill town 20km north of Matera, just inside Apulia, around a cathedral Frederick II began in the 1200s. Altamura Man, a Neanderthal found in a nearby cave, cannot be moved, so you see him on video. It is also home to protected Altamura bread.