Italy · budget stays
Cheap hotels in Matera
Budget-friendly hotels, hostels, and guest houses in Matera, Italy. Expedia surfaces budget-friendly nightly rates — refundable options are labelled per property.
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What things cost in Matera
Individual sites stay cheap and add up slowly: the Palombaro Lungo three euros, single rock churches two to four, Casa Noha seven, Casa Grotta di Vico Solitario eight and five for over-sixty-fives, combined passes roughly twelve to fifteen. The Appulo Lucane train from Bari is around six euros each way and the Via Saragat car park about five a day. A plate of orecchiette in a Sassi trattoria lands in the low teens.
What first-timers get wrong in Matera
Matera is not on the Italian national rail network. Trains come from Bari on the separate Ferrovie Appulo Lucane, whose platforms sit across Piazza Aldo Moro from Bari Centrale, and they do not run on Sundays, when it is buses only. Driving in means the Sassi limited-traffic zone, with fines from eighty euros upward, so leave the car at the Via Saragat lot for about five euros a day.
What to eat in Matera
Bread is the local monument here: pane di Matera IGP is durum semolina raised on sourdough and baked into a horned loaf that keeps for a week. Peperoni cruschi, Senise peppers sun-dried then flashed in oil, crumble over pasta and salt cod alike. Crapiata, a legume-and-grain soup, gets its own August street feast in Sasso Caveoso. The wine to order is Aglianico del Vulture, grown on volcanic soil north of town.
Matera's museums, and which one to pick
MUSMA shows twentieth-century sculpture inside the excavated cellars of seventeenth-century Palazzo Pomarici, so the rooms themselves are carved rock. Palazzo Lanfranchi holds Carlo Levi's Lucania 61, an eighteen-metre painted panorama of peasant Basilicata, alongside Luigi Guerricchio's canvases. Casa Noha, run by the FAI, uses projection rather than objects to explain the 1952 forced clearance of the caves. The Ridola archaeological museum closed in 2025 for refurbishment.
Matera after dark
Evenings run on the passeggiata between Piazza Vittorio Veneto, Via del Corso and Via Ridola, where terraces face the lit Sassi rather than each other. Casa Cava stages concerts fifteen metres underground in a former tufa quarry, its acoustics cut straight into the rock. Down in the Sassi the lanes are unlit residential stone by eleven. Nobody arrives for a club, because Matera does not really have one.
When to go to Matera
| Best months for cheap-hotels | Avg daily high | Rain days |
|---|---|---|
| October | 22°C / 72°F | 5 days |
| September | 27°C / 81°F | 7 days |
| April | 18°C / 64°F | 9 days |
The month to avoid is January — around 11°C (52°F) with roughly 6 rain days. Prices and crowds track the weather here: October is the sweet spot, January the month most people skip.
Pack for peak season: Summer clothes, plus one light layer for air-con and evenings, Comfortable walking shoes — every guide on this site assumes you'll use them.
Where to base yourself in Matera
- Sasso Barisano — The more restored cave district — most hotels and restaurants.
- Sasso Caveoso — Rawer, more ancient-feeling — cave churches and Casa Grotta.
- Civita — The rocky spur between the two Sassi, crowned by the Duomo.