Lost in Matera

After a little thunderstorm delay out of Rome, we made it to Bari and got on the train to Matera. The airports and trains have been so wonderful - clean, modern, efficient, so easy to navigate. We had an amazing lunch in Rome of fresh pasta and chicken grilled to order. The Bari train station was right in the airport - the ticket agents were all so helpful, from the women we bought tickets from, to the conductor teasing Nancy for momentarily losing her ticket to the guys and our transfer station helping us figure out how to punch the time on our tickets. My rugged Italian and their pretty decent English gets us through. We've been meeting people with a lot less English than in Naples and it is so fun to piece together communication.

We arrived at the Matera train station and our Air BnB appeared to be only 0.6 miles from the station so we decided to hoof it. All went well until we turned off the street from the station and we entered the labyrinth of Matera. As background, Matera is the oldest inhabited city in Italy - 7,000 years old. It's built into a mountain of caves and tunnels. I likened it to an MC Escher painting. iPhone directions quickly became useless.

We barreled by a group of teenagers only to find ourselves at our first (of many) dead ends that the iPhone directed us to:

We asked the kids if they knew where we should go and they started pointing all different directions, giggling at each other for speaking English and generally being about as helpful as a group of 15 years olds can be. Our BnB is a cave that was actually a former convent, so I told Nancy to just start following some nuns:

That didn't work either. Nancy finally found a passageway we had missed and we found our way to our street and our gorgeous apartment. It was about 8:30 and we arrived to our cave BnB:

We decided to head out for dinner to a place Nancy read about and had meticulously mapped ahead of time. She had written out turn by turn directions that lasted for exactly one turn before we were lost. We wandered around following our gut which led us through restaurants, up and down stairs to lots of dead ends - including helpful signs like this:

To be continued...