Restaurants in the province of Matera

The cooking around Matera is built on bread and the vegetable garden: few ingredients, nearly all of them humble, and an old precision in handling them. Bread is the centre of it, literally.

What you eat here

• Pane di Matera IGP — durum wheat semolina, sourdough, a tall horned loaf. It keeps a week, and half the local kitchen comes from what you do with it once it is stale.
• Cialledda — old bread, tomato, onion, oil, oregano: cold in summer, in broth in winter. The dish that explains the rule.
• Peperoni cruschi — sweet peppers sun-dried and flash-fried: crisp, not hot. Crumbled over pasta, salt cod, eggs.
• Hand-made orecchiette and cavatelli, with turnip tops or mixed-meat ragù.
• Caciocavallo podolico and farmhouse pecorino, aged in cave cellars.

The wine

The hills and badlands give Matera DOC from Primitivo, Sangiovese and Greco; the region's weightiest red, though, comes from the Vulture, in the province of Potenza.

Opening hours change. The ones on the listings come from public sources and may be out of date. Where a restaurant confirms tables with us, the availability you see is the real one.