For its size, Matera has strikingly many museums, and they differ from one another more than elsewhere: a national archaeological museum, a regional museum in a palace, contemporary sculpture in cave rooms, furnished cave dwellings, an oil mill underground. This page sorts them by what you want to take away.
Where to start
Casa Noha is not a museum with display cases but a projection: the history of the city is thrown onto the walls of an old dwelling. See it on your first day and you will understand far more on the walk afterwards. Everything else then makes more sense – which is why it comes first here rather than by importance.
How people lived here
The Casa Grotta shows a furnished cave dwelling with the furniture that was normal until the 1950s: one room for family, stores and animals. The visit takes a few minutes and changes how you look at every doorway you pass afterwards. There are several furnished caves in the city, among them one in the Rione Casalnuovo, plus the Museo Laboratorio della Civiltà Contadina, which collects the tools of farming life – implements, household goods, crafts.
Art
- Palazzo Lanfranchi – the regional museum of Basilicata, from medieval sacred art to Carlo Levi’s large mural Lucania ’61.
- MUSMA – contemporary sculpture, partly in cave rooms beneath Palazzo Pomarici. Worth seeing even if modern sculpture leaves you cold.
- The TAM – Tower Art Museum in a tower building of the old town shows changing exhibitions.
Prehistory
The Museo Archeologico Nazionale Domenico Ridola explains what the path across the plateau only hints at: that people have settled here for thousands of years, long before the first caves of the Sassi. If you have visited or plan to visit the Neolithic village on the Murgia, this is where the finds are.
Crafts and everyday life
The MOOM shows in an underground oil mill how olive oil was made – the installation itself is the exhibit. Casa Cava is strictly speaking not a museum but a venue in a former quarry; if you are looking for something in the evening, you will find it here rather than during the day.
In heat and in rain
Almost all of these buildings lie wholly or partly underground and are therefore cool. On hot afternoons and in rain they are the sensible choice – while outside, on the bright limestone, there is neither shade nor shelter.
Read on
- The Sassi di Matera – the context these houses explain
- Via Ridola – the street with the highest density of museums
- The cave dwellings of the Sassi – how the rooms were actually lived in
