We honestly didn’t choose to go to Matera as our last stop in Italy just because it appeared in the most recent Bond film, No Time to Die, but it was definitely a bonus when we realised it had been the filming location of the opening sequence.  We re-watched the film while we were in the city and our B&B host also showed us a fascinating video of how some parts of the sequence had been filmed.  

The cobbled streets were super slippery, as Oli can attest – sadly I don’t have a video but it looked a bit like this:

So, the stunt co-ordinators used about £55,000 worth of sticky, sticky Coca-Cola on the streets so that the Aston Martins and motorbikes had enough grip to drive at high speeds.  In order to protect the facade of a church and other buildings around a piazza during filming of one of the scenes, they recreated a new concrete cast to cover the buildings that replicated all the original features.  So essentially, what you see in the film is in Matera and looks just like the real thing, but isn’t at all.  

On the face of it, Matera is an absolutely gorgeous hilltop city where many of the traditional dwellings are carved out of the natural caves.  It’s one of the longest continually habited areas in the world (since approximately 7000 BC!), but was described last century as “the shame of Italy” for the poor conditions in which residents were living.  From the 1950s, the whole area was cleared, with residents forcibly moved to new accommodation in the new town.  However, in 1993, the Sassi districts were declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and in 2019, Matera was named as a European Capital of Culture, so its fortunes are changing.  There has been much renovation work in recent years to bring the cave dwellings to modern standards of habitability (still in evidence as we wandered the city).

We were lucky enough to get a reservation in a cave room at La Dolce Vita (one of the few bits of advance planning we did before leaving London) and it was certainly the best accommodation we experienced during our whole Italy leg – it’s not every day that you’re delighted to be given a windowless room!

Our B&B host urged us not to take things at face value as we toured the city (good advice for life, I guess), and we spent a lot of time trying to imagine how this beautiful, clean and easygoing city could ever have been anything else.  I suppose that if you add poor sanitation and a lack of electricity to living in a cave, things could go downhill fast.  We did actually visit a recreation of a traditional dwelling, but my main takeaway from this was that families seemed to have found some pretty ingenious places for storing their many children, since there wasn’t sufficient space for beds for the whole family.

As always, we spent most of our time exploring on foot and sampling the local aperitivo scene.  

On our final morning, we set our alarms for 5am and hiked across the ravine to watch the sunrise with a view over to Matera.  This was a gorgeous way to end our time in Italy.  I imagine the view would have been even better at sunset as the sun would have gone down behind the city, but we wouldn’t have had the viewpoint to ourselves and that glorious feeling of smugness at being the first there was so worth the early alarm!

The next part of our journey involved a 36-hour stint on a train, overnight ferry and two buses to reach our third country, Greece.  We were excited about taking the ferry, although we didn’t get a huge amount of sleep at first as it was so busy (instead, we upheld the British reputation for drinking by sharing an Italian red straight from the bottle as we couldn’t find any cups).

Thankfully, most people disembarked in the middle of the night at Igoumenitsa, so we were able to spread out to sleep and then spent the next morning watching the Greek coastline drift by before docking at Patras port around midday. 

We had a long hot walk into the city and then another long wait until our evening bus (which we mostly filled with exploring every bus station in the city before eventually discovering that our bus would depart from a ferry terminal – obvs), but we were immediately struck by the famous Greek hospitality when our server in a cafe gave me his personal recommendation for the most chocolatey snack and then promptly gifted it to me.  I think he could see I really needed it!

We’re so excited to be in Greece and to be able to spend a few weeks exploring it further.  It’s got a lot to live up to after Italy, but we have high hopes!

While it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that we spent the vast majority of our time in Naples eating pizza, drinking beer to recover from climbing the 104 steps up to our weird Airbnb, and flooding our apartment while using the washing machine (that one wasn’t on us), we did find a bit of time to explore some of Naples’ long and fascinating history.

First up, we took the circumvesuviana train 20 minutes into the suburbs to explore Herculaneum, a roman-era fishing village that had been partially destroyed by an earthquake in AD 62 and then fully submerged in volcanic ash in AD 79.

This meant it had a history that somewhat parallelled the much better known Pompeii, although with three key differences for us: it was a smaller site (more manageable for our incurable need for completeness!), with fewer visitors, and was much better preserved (because of the type of volcanic rock that enveloped the town, it even conserved some food). 

We visited roman villas and community meeting spaces that still had their second storeys standing, with beautiful marble cladding, mosaic floors and detailed decoration on the walls.

We saw a blacksmith’s shop that was so well preserved that archeologists were able to work out what was in for repair when the town was buried: a ridiculously ornate candelabra and a bronze statue.

We saw several thermopoliums, which were restaurants where you could pick up ready-made food (ancient branches of Wasabi, if you will). We also visited the men’s bath house, where you could still see the decorative mosaics of dolphins and cherubs, and where the compartments for men to leave their clothes were intact on the wall.

Apparently, there’s a lot more of the village that hasn’t yet been excavated because it is under modern Ercolano.  Some parts have been explored by tunnel, but what lies beyond that is still unknown.  It’s a bit mind-blowing to consider what kind of treasures might be underground still waiting to be discovered.  Other than a bit of a fascination with WW2, I’m not a huge history fan, but this was a truly impressive site and for me far exceeded Pompeii, which I’d visited in 2007 on an interrailing trip with Amy and Liz (pic enclosed just to embarrass them and check they are still reading 😉) 

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Our second visit was to Napoli Sotterranea.  Here, we descended under the streets of Naples and followed a tour that covered the use of the underground catacombs from ancient Greek times to give residents running water, right up to their use as air raid shelters in WW2.  There’s even a current project in collaboration with a local university examining growing plants underground using the ambient humidity to keep them watered – apparently they are supplying basil to many local restaurants.  

It was a really cool experience exploring underground in a space that had been used in so many ways over such a long time span.  I won’t lie – another of my favourite parts of this tour was also that we spent an hour at a comfortable temperature (we’ve not had air conditioning and it’s preeetty hot in southern Italy in August!)

Thankfully we visited before we tried the pizza fritta, so we could still fit through the extremely narrow passageways.

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We spent the remainder of our time in Naples walking for miles around different neighbourhoods to soak up the street life and architecture. This included skidding through a local fish market, admiring the Maradona murals in Quartieri Spagnoli, the art nouveau architecture and upmarket shopping in Chiaia, and walking the promenade from Santa Lucia to the port. 

We left Naples on the first bus of our trip; a four-hour ride to the hilltop city of Matera, via Candela.

Naples is the birthplace of pizza, and we were keen to do it justice.

Neapolitan pizza is quite unlike pizza found throughout the rest of Italy. Restrictions of the ingredients are tight; the tomatoes must be either San Marzano or Pomodorino del Piennolo del Vesuvio, and the mozzarella must either made from water buffalo milk or Fior di Latte (a specific type of cow’s milk). Furthermore, the dough must be kneaded and formed by hand, and baked for 60-90 seconds at 485 degrees celsius in a wood fired oven, producing a soft and elastic base once cooked. Yum! This is our experience of Naples through four pizzas in four days.

Pizza Imperatore 1906

We arrived in Naples on a Friday evening after 7 hours spent on 3 regional trains from Lucca. Although I’d heard about the city’s passion, noise and grit (and Sara had visited Naples previously), we both felt a pang of culture shock as we walked the raucous, dark streets of the Centro Storico (old town) on our way to pick up a late night takeaway pizza. This feeling was beautifully encapsulated when, back at our 5th floor apartment, a whole cake of fireworks were set off in the street below, exploding just outside our window.

Despite how tired and overwhelmed we felt at the time, our Margherita pizza from Pizzeria Imperatore 1906 turned out to be our favourite of our visit to Naples. Maybe it was our hunger levels, or possibly our initiation into Neapolitan pizza, but my goodness did it hit the spot. We were hooked, and immediately understood why there was a pizzeria on almost every block.

• Queueing chaos: 2/10 (disappointingly orderly)
• Pizza base: 10/10 (perfectly stretchy and very tasty)
• Toppings: 8/10 (simple but effective)
• Ambience: 8/10 (fireworks as dinnertime entertainment)

L’Antica Pizzeria da Michele

On our second evening in Naples, we headed to the hugely popular L’Antica Pizzeria da Michele, just across the square from our Airbnb. Upon arriving, the swarm of people surrounding the pizzeria gave us confidence this was a good choice, whilst simultaneously piquing our queuing anxiety. Almost everywhere we experienced in Italy had its own unique queuing system, and this was no different. A fellow punter took pity on us and explained how to navigate the rabble. At length, we placed our order, picked up some beers from a nearby shop to drink while we waited, and joined the impatient crowd to claim our pizzas.

This pizzeria served pizza as it used to be, without many “toppings” as we know them. You could choose between 4 options:

1. Margherita – tomato, Fior di latte, basil, pecorino
2. Marinara – tomato, oregano, garlic
3. Cosacca – tomato, basil, pecorino, pepper
4. Marita – half Marinara, half Margherita

Sara ordered a Marita, and I went for a Cosacca. In both cases, we were blown away by the level of flavour produced by so few ingredients. Maybe the protected local produce did have more flavour than those found elsewhere, or maybe these flavours are just easier to appreciate with few distracting toppings. Either way, we were both glad to have experienced what felt like the most authentic pizza of our visit to Italy so far.

• Queueing chaos: 10/10 (maximum confusion, loved it)
• Pizza base: 7/10 (a bit too floppy)
• Toppings: 10/10
• Ambience: 5/10 (eaten in our weird Airbnb)

Pizzeria e Trattoria Del Purgatorio

For our third Neapolitan pizza, we ate at a restaurant on the busy and largely pedestrian Via dei Tribunali. Despite its positive reviews, Pizzeria Del Purgatorio felt like it catered more to tourists, and matched neither the elegance or rustic charm of our first two pizzas. Desperate for more vegetables, Sara ordered a Siciliana, and I stuck with the classic Margherita. The pizza went down just fine, but it seemed like there was far better to be eaten in Naples.

• Queueing chaos: 1/10 (table service)
• Pizza base: 8/10
• Toppings: 8/10
• Ambience: 7/10 (good eavesdropping opportunities but the couple on the neighbouring table got distracted from their discussion of whether to make a go of their relationship so we were left with a cliffhanger)

‘a Puteca d”a Pizza

We’d seen “pizza fritta” (fried pizza) advertised and consumed throughout Naples. Having never even heard of it before, we were keen to experience it ourselves before leaving the city, even though we were very full of pizza by this point. On our final day, we joined the large crowd surrounding ‘a Puteca d”a Pizza, again in the Centro Storico. Long queues outside food venues generally mean either good food, or inefficient kitchens, or both.

We shared a pizza fritta filled with broccoli salsiccia (broccoli and sausage), one of our standard orders from our local pizzeria at home. Although the crispy folded outer was deliciously unhealthy, the pizza didn’t have the deep-filled, puffy centre that we’d seen from other vendors and definitely didn’t match our beloved Pizzeria di Camden on flavour. I’m sure there’s a place in my life for fried pizza so we’ll have to return to Naples to give it another shot.

Queueing chaos: 8/10
Pizza base: 9/10
Toppings: 7/10
Ambience: 9/10 (eaten in the suitably rowdy Centro Storico)

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We did things other than eat pizza while in Naples (honest!), but for that you’ll have to wait for the next post.