Carpe diem, seize the day, was written by Horace, the Lucanian poet born in Venosa. The phrase still suits the region, if not always the pace. Each of these days opens a different part of Basilicata: its food and wine, its old crafts, its landscapes, its history.
Activities
Some of the best days here never leave the town. In the kitchen, the Palazzo’s cooks show you how the pasta is rolled and cut by hand and how the pizza goes into the wood-fired oven, and then you eat what you made at a long table in the courtyard, under the pomegranate tree. The food and wine runs on from there, to cellar.
In town, Bernalda keeps its old trades alive, and we can arrange time with the afternoon tastings of the region’s Aglianico and a morning at a working masseria, where the cheese is made and the oil is poured. Another day, follow a trained dog into the oak woods to hunt truffles, then taste them shaved over eggs in a medieval cave local artisans, from the ceramic workshops of Grottaglie to crafts handed down for generations. None of it is hurried.
Adventures
When you do go out, the region opens quickly. Matera is under an hour away, its Sassi cut into the rock and lived in for thousands of years, and nearby Craco stands empty on its hillside, a whole town left to the wind.
On the coast at Metaponto, a Greek temple to Hera has kept its columns since Magna Graecia. Cross into Puglia for the trulli of Alberobello, the baroque of Lecce, and the white streets of Ostuni, or the cliffs and coves of Polignano a Mare and the harbor at Monopoli.
Gravina lies an hour off, its old town split by a ravine and a seventeenth-century aqueduct bridge that appears in the Bond film No Time to Die. And when the pull is the land itself, there is a day for the parks, the rivers, and the Ionian coast, taken slowly, on foot or by bike.
Nature & Outdoors near Palazzo Margherita
The land around Bernalda is wilder than the town lets on. Drive an hour and you reach Pollino, the largest national park in Italy, where the Pino Loricato pines have held the ridgelines for a thousand years and the Lao River runs fast enough to raft through its gorge.
Closer in, the Little Lucanian Dolomites rise in sharp grey teeth above two stone villages, Castelmezzano and Pietrapertosa, linked by a footpath and, in summer, by the Angel Flight, a steel cable strung between them that carries you across the valley at speed.
Above Matera lies the Murgia, a limestone plateau of caves and rupestrian churches cut into the rock by hermits. It can be walked in a morning, ending at a chapel opened just for you, with something to eat and drink in the quiet. North, on the slopes of Monte Vulture, the twin Monticchio Lakes sit in an old volcanic crater, ringed by forest.
And the sea is never far. You can ride to it, a whole morning by bike down the Basento valley through orchards and pine woods to the Ionian shore, or simply drive the few minutes to the beach and spend the day there. However you go out, the idea is the same: let the day be long, and let the place set the pace.
