Region
Basilicata
Basilicata's 31 towns in our catalogue split across the Potenza and Matera provinces; 9 carry the Borghi più belli d'Italia designation.
31 towns · highest: Pietrapertosa 1,088m · smallest: Guardia Perticara 517 people
31 of 31 towns
31 of 31 towns
Accettura
Province: Matera
A 770-meter village in the Gallipoli Cognato park where, each Pentecost, a Turkey oak is married to a holly tree.
Acerenza
Province: Potenza
A walled ridge town at 833 meters in the north Lucanian hills, archbishopric since 1068 under a Romanesque cathedral begun in 1080.
Aliano
Province: Matera
The clay-hill village at 555 meters above the Agri valley where Carlo Levi served his 1935 exile and is buried in the cemetery.
Bernalda
Province: Matera
A 127-meter hill town between the Bradano and Basento, Francis Ford Coppola's ancestral home, holding the Magna Graecia columns of the Tavole Palatine.
Calvello
Province: Potenza
A 730-meter ceramic town at the foot of Monte Venturino, working clay since 1200 when Benedictines from Faenza brought the wheel south.
Castelmezzano
Province: Potenza
A medieval village at 750 meters wedged into the Dolomiti Lucane sandstone teeth, linked to Pietrapertosa by a 1,452-meter zipline since 2007.
Craco
Province: Matera
A medieval ghost town on a 391-meter clay cliff, abandoned after the 1963 landslide and the 1980 Irpinia earthquake, filming location of Gibson and Bond.
Grottole
Province: Matera
A hilltop borgo at 481 meters between the Bradano and Basento, where six hundred empty houses outnumber residents in the centro storico.
Guardia Perticara
Province: Potenza
The stone village at 678 meters above the Sauro valley, rebuilt block by block in Gorgoglione sandstone after the 1980 earthquake.
Irsina
Province: Matera
Called Montepeloso until 1895, a 548-meter Bradano-valley hill town whose cathedral holds the only surviving polychrome sculpture attributed to Andrea Mantegna.
Lagonegro
Province: Potenza
A 666-meter Valle del Noce town founded by Byzantine monks, where local legend places the burial of Lisa del Giocondo, Leonardo's Mona Lisa.
Latronico
Province: Potenza
A mountain town at 888 meters on the northern edge of the Pollino, with two prehistoric thermal springs at the Calda hamlet below.
Maratea
Province: Potenza
Basilicata's only commune on the Tyrrhenian, thirty-two kilometers of rocky coast under a twenty-one meter marble Christ raised over Monte San Biagio in 1965.
Matera
Province: Matera
Cave dwellings carved into limestone since the Paleolithic, called the shame of Italy in the 1950s and made European Capital of Culture in 2019.
Melfi
Province: Potenza
At 530 meters on the slopes of Monte Vulture, first Norman capital of the south and the seat of Frederick II's 1231 Constitutions of Melfi.
Miglionico
Province: Matera
A hilltop borgo at 461 meters above the Bradano, the seven-tower castle that gave the 1485 Conspiracy of the Barons its hall.
Nova Siri
Province: Matera
A 350-meter Ionian hill town with a Blue Flag beach nine kilometers below, near the site of the ancient Greek colony of Siris.
Pietrapertosa
Province: Potenza
Basilicata's highest commune at 1,088 meters, built into the Lucanian Dolomites with a Saracen rock-cut fortress and a 1,400-meter zipline to Castelmezzano.
Pisticci
Province: Matera
A hill town at 364 meters above the Ionian, rebuilt in three hundred identical white houses after the 1688 landslide killed four hundred.
Policoro
Province: Matera
A Ionian-coast town on the Gulf of Taranto built on the ruins of the Greek polis of Heraclea — birthplace of the Tavole di Eraclea bronze inscriptions and home to one of the region's most-visited Bandiera Blu beaches and the National Museum of the Siritide.
Rivello
Province: Potenza
A 479-meter ridge above the Noce valley where Lombards and Byzantines lived side by side, holding Latin and Greek rites until the seventeenth century.
Rotonda
Province: Potenza
The Pollino park's Lucanian gateway — a 3,171-resident borgo at 626m on the Basilicata/Calabria border, headquartered HQ for the Parco Nazionale del Pollino (Italy's largest national park), with the Fagiolo Bianco Poverello + Melanzana Rossa di Rotonda DOP slow-food products, the Borgo Autentico mark, and the Loricato pine forests immediately above town.
Rotondella
Province: Matera
The 'Balcony of the Ionian' — a 2,400-resident Lucanian borgo on a 576m hilltop overlooking the Metapontino plain and the Ionian Sea, with intact medieval streets, the Chiesa di Santa Maria della Neve, and a high-quality DOP olive oil from the surrounding terraced groves.
San Fele
Province: Potenza
A stone village at 872 meters between Monte Toretta and Castello, anchored by Otto I's 969 fortress and ten waterfalls down the Bradano.
San Mauro Forte
Province: Matera
A 540-meter Lucanian hill town built around a surviving Norman tower, where the Sagra dei Campanacci on 16 January wakes the village with cowbells.
Sasso di Castalda
Province: Potenza
A 949-meter village in the Lucanian Apennines whose emigrants produced the engineer who launched Apollo 11, now crossed by a 300-meter Tibetan footbridge.
Stigliano
Province: Matera
At 909 meters on the northern edge of the Lucanian calanchi, the highest commune in Matera province, Basilicata's capital under the Spanish Medina from 1556.
Terranova di Pollino
Province: Potenza
At 926 meters on the Lucanian side of the Pollino, the gateway into Italy's largest national park, home of the Sarmento red potato.
Valsinni
Province: Matera
Isabella Morra's tragic castle — a 1,344-resident Lucanian borgo on a hilltop above the Sinni river, with the 11th-c Castello Morra where the 16th-c Renaissance poet Isabella Morra was murdered by her brothers in 1545, a Touring Club Bandiera Arancione + Pollino park signal, and the annual Parco Letterario festival reading her poems in the rooms where she wrote them.
Venosa
Province: Potenza
Founded as Roman Venusia in 291 BC, birthplace of Horace, with an unfinished abbey built from amphitheater stones and a 1470 Aragonese castle.
Viggiano
Province: Potenza
A 975-meter Val d'Agri ridge town, home of the Black Madonna of Lucania and the Italian folk harp, on Europe's largest onshore oil field.
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The market town between the Soligo and Lierza rivers in the Prosecco UNESCO zone, birthplace of the twentieth-century poet Andrea Zanzotto.
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A 2014 merger commune at 295 meters in the Foglia valley, born from Colbordolo, birthplace of Raffaello's father, and Sant'Angelo in Lizzola.
Abano Terme
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Europe's oldest thermal town on the Euganean Hills' eastern slope, where 80°C bromo-iodine springs have been drawing bathers since the eighth century BC.
Bosa
Province: Oristano
A colour-washed riverside town on Sardinia's only navigable river, with a Malaspina castle on the hill and the tanneries of Sas Conzas along the Temo.
Castagnole delle Lanze
Province: Asti
An Asti hill town at 298 meters between Langhe and Monferrato, with two Baroque churches and a nineteenth-century astronomical tower.