Ciao Matera!

Allora (means "and then" - we hear this a lot), we did find our restaurant - there was a sort of ring road along the edge of the city next a deep gorge that we followed - and it was beautiful, with whitewashed cave walls and petrified mulberry roots curling out of the ceiling in places looking like coral. Most of the waiters didn't speak English, but there was one that spoke more and we tried to teach us some things and communicate with us - even running off to use a translation tool when we asked about things like petrified mulberry roots..

We ordered the local wine - Anglianco del Vulture - and Nancy order d the most amazing cheese plate we've ever seen with a giant ball on fresh burata mozzarella in the middle that was flaking apart and melted in your mouth. It was mozzarella soft you could easily spread it on bread. We ate so much cheese and bread and fresh green olive oil and sharp balsamic that we could barely eat our dinners - oops! We capped it off with some limoncello - once again closing the place down (Nancy and Dayna, always the last ones to leave!) - and headed back to our cave dwelling.

In the morning we had breakfast with our hosts in their home next door - they made us a beautiful spread of fresh mozzarella, peach juice, cherry pastries and some kind of melon that was like a giant, juicy, more firm cantaloupe. They were very sweet and didn't really speak English, but we managed to ask a few questions and then the woman typed some recommendations for our day on Matera into a translation program on her computer.

On her recommendation, we walked to the main cathedral - the Duomo - and found it after only maybe one or two dead ends. It was under construction, but we visited a multimedia presentation at Casa Noha next door that showed the history of Matera and development of the site as a protected UNESCO heritage site. Matera was a site of great poverty and shame for Italy with huge families living in the caves without sanitation until well into the 1950s. The infant mortality rate was nearly 50%. Some well-meaning, but ultimately failed, socialist programs were enacted to move all the people out and the city was actually largely abandoned until the 1990s. You can still see many of the sassi that are boarded up, but it is being revived and people were proud to tell us that in 2019, Matera will be called out as a cultural example in Europe.

After this fascinating review of the city, we headed down to another church on the other side of the sassi - Chiesa San Pietro. From that church, you can see the ravine that we noticed the previous night, which is pockmarked with super primitive caves that no one lives in. You can kind of get a sense of what the landscape naturally is and how the sassi came to be. Next to this church, there was another attraction (Casa Grotto) that recreated some of the old cave life and showed how people lived before the city was abandoned. The cave would have had a little area carved out for their farm animals and typically all slept in one room.

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We then walked further up the road and found a great lunch place Nancy had heard about. It was a busy, fancy white table cloth kind of place, but we were seated by the owner and we ordered some
local rosè and a mixed plate of their appetizers - panzanella salad, potato and spicy sausage purée capped with the crunchy local peppers (crusco- my favorite - we tried to find a big bag of them -they look like spicy hot peppers, but they are dried so they are almost like a potato chip with a mild peppery tang), fresh warm mozz and ricotta - we stuffed ourselves and headed over to check in to our first hotel on our bike trip agenda.

The Locanda do San Martino was just a few doors down from our BnB (thank god or we could have ended up wandering all day with our luggage). We checked in only to find they also have a thermal pool in the caves under the hotel along with a sauna and steam room! Our room was actually off the courtyard with a separate entrance - very spacious and cool.We relaxed for a bit and then headed down to the pools for some hydro massage therapy - heaven!! Afterwards, we loaded up bananagrams and headed to a bar to have some aperitifs and play - Nancy beat me three times, but I won the first Scrabble game with a comeback late in the game (293-277).

We had an unexceptional dinner at Nadí where they cooked my lamb to oblivion and Nancy mimed sawing and cutting the tough meat so that she could get me a steak knife rather than watching me saw away at it with the butter knife provided. Oh well, I wasn't really hungry anyway. We had one more night cap at a little wine bar (we are biking 44 miles the next day- what's one more class of wine!) and then went to bed.

We picked up our bikes the next morning - luckily we had visited the garage the day before so we could avoid getting lost in the morning, only to take a wrong turn and end up somewhere else. We still found it relatively quickly after a lovely breakfast spread at the hotel. Nancy found some yogurt that appeared to be sweet corn flavored based on the picture on the label, but we didn't try it. Hard boiled eggs and some bread and ham would prove to be my only meal of the day - spoiler alert - traveling in Italy on a Sunday does not offer a lot of food options.