Basilicata

Carlo Levi called it the land where Christ stopped — meaning the civilization of the modern world had never fully arrived. What he meant as a diagnosis in 1945 reads today partly as a description of what has been preserved: a landscape of ravines and ancient rock cities, a food culture of remarkable austerity and depth, a silence in the interior that is harder and harder to find anywhere in Europe. Matera, the cave city, is now a UNESCO site and a destination in its own right; the rest of Basilicata — the Pollino mountains, the Agri valley, the Metapontum coast — remains largely its own business.Our Basilicata coverage takes seriously both the famous city and the landscape that surrounds it.