Women only
Basilicata tour

At a glance

This bakery has made Pane di Matera since 1890, and two sisters run it today. For generations the women of Matera made the bread while the men’s names were stamped on top. Not only will you learn how much of the women’s history is tied to this bread, but you’ll make your own loaf and taste plenty of delicious food.

Elena, along with her husband Andrea grows olives on a hillside in Basilicata. She could have stayed in Rome, but she chose this place, where the oldest tree has stood 350 years and the quiet is so deep her city friends can’t sleep through it. If you’re turning over a change of your own, you’ll understand why she stayed. You sit under those trees and taste oil pressed the night the olives came down.

Taste a gelato at a counter in Castelmezzano, a village perched in the Lucanian Dolomites. Meet Pina Caruso, who put the whole region in a single scoop — her Acheruntino: cooked wine, toasted almonds, and the same Pane di Matera you’ll make at the forno. It won first place at the Gelato Festival World Masters, the biggest gelato prize in the world.

Meet Elena Fucci, who changed her career path when her family decided to sell the grandfather vineyard. She decided to study enology instead, and stayed. Today she makes a single wine, Titolo, the full expression of an extinct volcano, and you’ll sip your way through it over a long southern-Italian meal.

Walk the streets of Craco — a medieval town in the badlands that emptied first when its people left for America, then for good after the hill gave way in 1963. Roofs open to the sky, paint still on the walls. For anyone whose family left a town like this, it isn’t sightseeing. It’s return.

You’ll sleep in a cave in the Sassi of Matera — rooms cut into rock where families lived for millennia. In 1952 the state emptied them, moved half the city out, and for forty years the caves stood dark. Then people chose to come back and light them again.

Meet Mariantonietta Vaccaro, who turned down a chemistry doctorate to make caciocavallo podolico — a rare, cave-aged cheese from wild cows — four generations after her great-grandmother came to these mountains with two Podolica cows as her dowry.

Our week is built around the women of Basilicata — the ones who stayed. Each made the same stubborn, unlikely choice: to build something rare in a place most people were leaving. Here are two of them: One turned down a doctorate to make cheese at nine hundred metres. Another refused to let her family sell the vineyard she’d grown up in, on the slopes of an extinct volcano, and now makes a wine critics count among Italy’s greatest. You’ll spend the week with them.

And you’ll meet them backstage — in the kitchens, groves, and cellars where the work actually happens, not in a demonstration arranged for visitors.

We build the week around food, because food is how Basilicata speaks in the present tense. The region has history to spare; we’ve chosen to show you its today.

Most tours give Basilicata a day. A glance at Matera, then back on the bus to Puglia. We want you to go deeper. And yes, you’ll be comfortable — but comfort was never the point. The point is who you meet.

You’re deeply curious about food — not just how it tastes, but the land, the hands, and the choices behind it.

You’re happy to let a regional lunch stretch to two hours, wine and all, with nowhere else you need to be.

You want to truly connect with the women who make things here — not watch a demonstration, but sit at the table.

You’re welcome at any age. Most of the women who travel with us are between 60 and 85, so you’ll be in warm, lively company.