Explore Matera

San Giovanni Battista is an Apulian Romanesque church in Matera, built from 1229 to 1236 as Santa Maria la Nova for nuns from Acre and made the parish church of Saint John the Baptist in 1695. Its original 13th-century carved portal survives behind a later row of arches, and the piazza in front was a set for the James Bond film No Time to Die.

The Sassi di Matera are the two old cave districts of Matera, Sasso Caveoso and Sasso Barisano, where houses, churches and cisterns are dug into the calcarenite slope above the Gravina ravine. Inhabited since prehistory and largely emptied by order of the state in the 1950s, they were listed by UNESCO in 1993 together with the park of the rock churches.

Matera Cathedral, dedicated to the Madonna della Bruna and Saint Eustace, is an Apulian Romanesque church built from 1203 to 1270 on the ridge of the Civita between the two Sassi. Its front has a sixteen-spoke rose window and a 52-metre bell tower; inside are a 13th-century fresco of the Madonna della Bruna and carved wooden choir stalls of 1453.

San Pietro Caveoso, the church of Saints Peter and Paul, stands on its square at the edge of the Gravina ravine in the Sasso Caveoso. Its Baroque front has three portals with statues of the Madonna, Saint Peter and Saint Paul and a bell tower with a pyramidal spire; inside are a painted wooden polyptych of 1540 and a 13th-century font.