Matera (Italy)

Matera

Edie: "Our town looks like thousands of cave houses tumbling down the hill, right down to the ravine. Some places you look at, you think they are just normal modern houses or cafés, but when you actually go inside they are really caves hidden in the hill that have been made into cave houses." 

 

'The rock church' - Chiesa di Santa Maria d'Idris, with 12th to 17th century frescoes.
Della: "We went to another church with lots more frescoes. It was very old and mouldy."

The many cats were a highlight of the girls' visit to Matera

 

Piazza di San Pietro Caveoso

Edie: "We went to a cave house from the olden days where peasants and their animals used to live. There were only three beds and 11 people!"



Our own cave house was much more comfortable.
From Della's diary: "Today I woke up and had a strange feeling. It was because we were in a cave!"

Jen:

Walking through - or, should I say, up and down - the streets of Matera, you can almost forget which century you're in. There's a reason it's been the location for the shooting of movies including Mel Gibson's The Passion of Christ.
The town is riddled with sassi - cave dwellings built into the edge of a beautiful ravine. These days, many of the sassi have been converted into tourist apartments (like the one we stayed in), but they weren't so romantic and cosy 50 years ago. In the 1950s, more than half the population lived in these cave houses with no electricity, plumbing, sewerage. On average there were six children per household and the infant mortality rate was 50%. Malaria was rife. Publication of an article by Carl Levi sparked government action - 15,000 people were moved into new housing schemes.
The Matera sassi are now UNESCO-listed. The town's a wonderful mix of beautifully restored houses (including sassi) and churches and dilapidation, with ugly apartment buildings in the newer outskirts. There were some really good vantage points to see the gorge leading up to rough, abandoned caves leading up to inhabited caves and 'above-ground' houses, with modern apartment buildings above.
Churches built into the rock house ancient frescoes. We loved letting ourselves get lost in the maze of streets (except the time we were starving, hot, and there wasn't a restaurant in sight!). We had some of the best meals of our trip at a  restaurant across the road from our cave apartment - including pasta with black and white truffles (it was truffle season!). An amazing experience - will definitely head back one day.

Puglia 2

Della: "We went to a little restaurant. We had pasta and some rolled up beef and curled sausages." Hand-made orecchiette ("small ear") pasta is a local classic, as is grilled meat.

 

Lunch in Lecce. Della: "I had a very yummy lunch. It was a pesto pasta with clams, prawns, tomato and mint."



Edie enjoys MORE orecchiette pasta while Jen tries the antipasto. Those seven dishes plus bread are meant to be an entrée!

Detail of the Basilica di Santa Croce in Lecce. Edie: "We saw a lovely old church that had heaps of gargoyles looking down on you. Dragons, lions and horses mainly. There were also some naked ladies!"

 

Lecce

Lecce

Ostuni. Della: "Everything was white and it was on a big hill. There was an amazing view of the beautiful coast with lots of olive trees."

 

Ostuni

Beautiful Martina Franca

 

 

Puglia (Italy)

Our trullo, near Alberobello

The local countryside - our trullo is in the background

 

Gotta drive a Fiat in Italy ...

 

Prickly pear in our garden - apparently you can eat the fruit, after picking and peeling it very carefully. We weren't game!

Trulli galore in the UNESCO-listed town of Alberobello, just a few kilometres from our own trullo

 

Edie: "I think they look like biscuit jars. They have flat stones piled on each other for a roof with no concrete. The walls are made of cementy stuff."



We were in town for the festival of saints Cosma and Damiano Medici.
Edie: "There were heaps of lights everywhere. They were very pretty. There was a band playing in a bandstand. It was very good music. Then we walked down the street a bit and found some rides. (...) At midnight, Dad woke me up and I saw lots of amazing fireworks!"

 

Exploring nearby Locorotondo - as Della said, "ANOTHER pretty old town with narrow, winding streets."

  

 

Jen:

It had been difficult to settle on one region of Italy to visit. Matthew and I had been to several beautiful places in Italy before, and it had been tempting to return to them with the girls on this trip. But we’re glad we decided to focus this time on a new region for us – Puglia, at the heel of the Italian boot.

We stayed for a week in a ‘trullo’ near Alberobello. A trullo is a 16th Century conical-roofed stone house - like nothing we'd seen anywhere else. A single trullo is not very big and generally constitutes one part of a house these days – in our case, the conical roof was over our dining area.

The food in Puglia was great, even for self-catering - the deli section of an Italian supermarket is something else.

I really enjoyed using my schoolgirl + night class Italian, which came back OK despite being in mothballs for 10 or so years. Certainly more than my schoolgirl French did!

Edie:

I liked staying in a trullo, and especially since it had a pool! All the streets looked the same! White, cobbled, very narrow! There was also a lot of plants. In the country, there were even cacti! I really liked the light festival thingy. There were also a lot of children's rides, including dodgems, bull riding, carousels. I went on the dodgems by myself, and it was really cool. I loved bumping into people, and whizzing round everywhere! Della and I loved stuffing ourselves with pasta!

From Della’s journal (23 September):

Today we went to a little down with trullis. It was like a maze! There were corners and turns. We stopped at a café for lunch and I had pasta, chinotto and a chocolate sorbet.

Trullis are houses with a main circle and then it goes up. It gets narrower and at the top it’s got sort of a big round blob.

 

 

 

 

 

Santiago de Compostela (Spain)

Entrance to our apartment (second floor)

Our beautiful apartment

 

View from our living room

The street below

Artwork on one of the city's many churches

In the beautiful art nouveau Café Casino

 

In the Obradoiro square

On the roof of the cathedral

 

Jen:

Santiago de Compostela was really just a stopover on our way from Galicia to southern Italy, but I wish we’d stayed longer than one full day. As soon our taxi entered the old town I was taken by the maze of largely pedestrianised cobbled streets; well-preserved, handsome buildings; and enticing shops (which, luckily for our budget, I didn’t get much of a chance to visit as most were closed on the Sunday we were there). Our spacious apartment on the second floor of one of these cobbled streets was palatial and beautifully decorated (https://www.airbnb.com.au/rooms/2632052). The ceiling to floor windows in the living room opened onto the Santa Maria Salome church across the street and were ideal for watching the pedestrian traffic below.
It was no longer summer but Santiago was still heaving with tourists and pilgrims. The town is the last stop on the Camino de Santiago (St James’s Way). People of all ages wearing backpacks adorned with scallop shells – the symbol of St James – would converge on the cathedral in the main square.
A highlight of our brief time in Santiago was a visit to the cathedral’s rooftop, which – as well as giving us an up-close-and-personal perspective of some of the building’s beautiful features – provided a birdseye view of the old town below. The electrical storm that started towards the end of the tour added a little extra excitement!

Della:

I loved it in Santiago. The lovely streets and buildings was a real delight to see. A big bell tower inspired me so I drew it. I drew it a bit different.
We went for a lot of lovely walks and saw the sun set. We went on the roof of the cathedral and boy, what an amazing view it was! I felt quite wobbly and it was very noisy when the bell rang.
Dad took us to a playground and I played on a whizzy-roundy thing.
It all went too soon. Our taxi drove up but unfortunately we had left the key to the gates in the apartment. So we had to climb it, and that was hard because the gate was very spiky. Mummy’s skirt got caught on a spike and she ended up with a big bruise.

Edie:

We went on lots of walks through the town. On the cathedral there was a great view, and at one point there was thunder, but dad and I knew, that unless our hair stood up, then we were all safe! Outside, we saw a man playing bagpipes, and Della recorded it and I took photos. We put some money in his bagpipe case. Our apartment was very roomy and pretty. My bed and Della’s were basically joined together! There were big cupboards that me and Della slipped into, and hid in. Then whenever somebody opened the door, we would yell boo, and they wouldn’t know where we were! It was hilarious!

Santiago 2 (Spain)

The cathedral's clock tower

View from the cathedral roof

Cheeky angels

 

Buskers outside the cathedral

The cathedral's swinging 'botafumeiro' - the biggest in the world - dispenses clouds of incense

Some interesting sculptures in a square near the cathedral ...