Bandiera Arancione
Bandiera Arancione in Basilicata
5 towns
Basilicata carries 5 of the Bandiera Arancione towns we cover. They cluster in the Potenza and Matera provinces.
The three most recognised in our catalogue are Aliano, Castelmezzano, and Sasso di Castalda. 2 more towns carry the mark alongside them.
Aliano
Province: Matera · 555 m
The clay-hill village at 555 meters above the Agri valley where Carlo Levi served his 1935 exile and is buried in the cemetery.
Castelmezzano
Province: Potenza · 750 m
A medieval village at 750 meters wedged into the Dolomiti Lucane sandstone teeth, linked to Pietrapertosa by a 1,452-meter zipline since 2007.
Sasso di Castalda
Province: Potenza · 949 m
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.
Guardia Perticara
Province: Potenza · 678 m
The stone village at 678 meters above the Sauro valley, rebuilt block by block in Gorgoglione sandstone after the 1980 earthquake.
Valsinni
Province: Matera · 250 m
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.
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From elsewhere in Italy
Five more towns to discover
Putignano
Province: Bari
Europe's longest-running carnival — Putignano Carnevale has run continuously since 1394, with 631 years of cartapesta papier-mâché floats, a 26,000-resident Murgia town on the Bari–Lecce plateau, and the Grotta del Trullo karst cave inside the centro.
Pistoia
Province: Pistoia
Italy's nursery capital and the medieval Tuscan rival that gave its name to the pistol — a quietly extraordinary centro storico of zebra-striped Romanesque churches, Andrea della Robbia's polychrome frieze on the Ospedale del Ceppo, and Italy's Capital of Culture 2017, all 30 minutes from Florence by train.
Tropea
Province: Vibo Valentia
Cliff town on a tufa headland over the Tyrrhenian Coast of the Gods, with a Norman monastery on a sea rock.
Caldes
Province: Trento
A scattered Val di Sole commune on the Noce, six hamlets gathered around a thirteenth-century tower-house castle that once belonged to the Thun family.
Cantiano
Province: Pesaro e Urbino
A border borgo at 374 meters under Monte Catria on the old Via Flaminia, known for the Good Friday Turba and the sour-cherry visciola harvest.