In the territory of Matera there are more than a hundred and fifty churches carved into the rock, and three of them can be visited in the Sassi. The rest open on the other side of the ravine, and most cannot be reached without a guide.
It is better to be clear about that from the start, because the words “rock churches” appear on every leaflet in the city and then the visitor is offered a ticket that covers three. Matera’s rock heritage is enormous and lies largely inside a park, on limestone walls, in places you reach on foot.
Since 2026 the path that goes down into the ravine and crosses the suspension bridge is no longer free to walk. The Park Authority has introduced a ticket, and it is the change that most affects how you plan the day.
And what makes the largest of the rock churches in the Sassi so unsettling?
What a rock church is, and what it is not
What is the difference between a rock church and a cave with a fresco in it? The difference is design. In a rock church the architecture is carved in negative: rock is taken away instead of stones being piled up, and the apses, the columns, the arches, the false domes, even the cornices are cut out of the solid mass. The builder works like a sculptor, and starts from the top.
The result is that inside these churches you find elements that serve no purpose at all. A column carved out of the tufa holds nothing up, because the vault stands by itself: it is there because a church is supposed to have columns. This is architecture represented, not built, and that is what makes going inside worthwhile.
Why did people here carve instead of build? Because the calcarenite of these hills can be cut with simple tools and hardens in the open air: carving cost less than quarrying, hauling and laying stone. The phenomenon takes off between the eighth and the thirteenth centuries, when first the Benedictine monks and then the communities of Greek rite arrive, and two liturgies and two ways of painting overlap in Matera.
Santa Lucia alle Malve, the first women’s monastery
Of the three churches in the Sassi, this is the one I would start from, and not because of where it stands.
Santa Lucia alle Malve is the first Benedictine women’s monastic settlement in the area, active from the eighth century, and for centuries the most important in the city. Sant’Agata was venerated here at first: a document of 1208 still calls it Monasterio ecclesie S. Agathes de Matera.
Inside, the wall that matters is the one with the Madonna del Latte, frescoed around 1270. The Virgin nurses the Child, and it is an image of domestic tenderness that in the thirteenth century is anything but a given.
The reward comes when you learn whose hand it is. The fresco is attributed to the same painter who in the cathedral painted the Madonna della Bruna, and for that very reason scholars call him the Master of the Bruna. Two works in two buildings that look as if they belonged to different worlds, a church dug out of the tufa and the mother church of the city, come from the same brush in the same years: if you want the other half of the comparison, it is in Matera cathedral. The painter’s name is a hypothesis, though, and not the only one: part of the scholarship gives both frescoes to Rinaldo da Taranto.
Around the Madonna del Latte there survive a Saint Michael the Archangel, a Saint Gregory and the pair of Saint Benedict and Saint Scholastica, the founder of the order and his sister, which is the monastery’s signature of belonging.
The Madonna de Idris and San Giovanni in Monterrone
The feature that ends up in every photograph of Matera is not a church: it is a rock spur.
The Monterrone is the block of rock that rises in the middle of the Sasso Caveoso, with two churches carved inside it. On top, with the cross, stands Santa Maria de Idris; a little lower, linked by a tunnel you walk through, is San Giovanni in Monterrone.
The whole experience is in that passage. You go in through a small dark space, walk along a corridor cut into the rock and come out into a second room covered with frescoes, from the twelfth century to the seventeenth, layered one over another like a palimpsest. It is not a museum route but the way the church was built.
The name deserves a line. Idris comes from odigitria, the Virgin who shows the way, and by some readings the water: it is a Byzantine Marian title brought south by Greek monks, and its presence here tells you that in Matera that culture was not a tourist import but somebody’s liturgy.
San Pietro Barisano, the largest and the most unsettling
In the other district, the Sasso Barisano, stands the largest rock church in the city.
San Pietro Barisano, originally San Pietro de Veteribus, has a masonry front of 1755 that misleads: from outside it looks like any Baroque church, and the moment you step in you realise the Baroque is only the stopper on a space carved into the rock.
Why does a church where mass is no longer said have a row of stone seats cut into the wall of an underground room? Because they are not seats. They are scolatoi, draining niches, and they served a funerary practice reserved for priests: the body was placed seated in a niche cut into the tufa and stayed there until decomposition was complete. Only then were the bones moved. The room is called a sepolcreto, and it can be visited.
There is a loss to tell as well, because it is part of the building’s story. In the twentieth century damp forced the removal of the frescoes in the chapel behind the second altar of the right aisle, along with the baptismal font, and their transfer to the nearby church of Sant’Agostino: Saint Catherine of Alexandria, the Annunciation, Saint Canio, Saint Augustine, Saint Eustace and Saint Vitus are no longer where the people who commissioned them wanted them.
The ticket: one church, two or three
The three churches share a single ticket office, and it helps to know how it works before you arrive, because the choice is made at the counter.
The circuit is run by Oltre l’Arte and covers Santa Maria de Idris with San Giovanni in Monterrone, which count as one entry, Santa Lucia alle Malve and San Pietro Barisano. You buy a ticket for one, for two or for all three, and the price per church falls as the number goes up.
If you have half a day, take the three-church ticket: they are ten minutes apart and together they tell three different stories, the monastery, the Byzantine layering and the funerary practice. If you have only an hour, choose the Madonna de Idris, because that tunnel is the one thing here you will not find anywhere else.
Careful: the ticket does not cover every rock church in the Sassi. The complex of the Madonna delle Virtù and San Nicola dei Greci, two churches with a monastery and a cave house carved into the Sasso Barisano, is run separately and belongs to none of the three tiers.
The other hundred and fifty, in the Murgia park
The rock churches of the Sassi are the tip. The bulk of them lies opposite, on the far side of the ravine.
The Parco della Murgia Materana, established in 1990, protects more than a hundred and fifty rock churches spread along the canyon and across the plateau, together with the Neolithic village of Murgia Timone and a huge number of shepherds’ caves. Among the finest are the Madonna delle Tre Porte, San Falcione, San Vito alla Murgia and the sanctuary of Santa Maria della Palomba, which stands sheer above the ravine.
Here the right word is not visit but hike. Many of these churches have no custodian, no lighting and stand in spots you reach along a path: with a guide you see them, on your own almost never. There is a tour of the rock churches of the Murgia park that solves the transport problem and the question of the keys in one go.
Trail 406 and the suspension bridge: what has changed
This is the part to read carefully, because until recently the answer was different.
Trail 406 starts at Porta Pistola, at the bottom of the Sasso Caveoso, drops into the ravine, crosses the suspension bridge built in 2015 and climbs to Murgia Timone, where the viewpoint over the Sassi opens up and the Jazzo Gattini visitor centre stands. It is about six kilometres and two hours of walking, on uneven and exposed ground.
The trail was closed in January 2023 after part of the rock face came away, and reopened in April 2024. It is open today but no longer free: the Murgia Materana park authority has introduced an access ticket, with booking, covering the trail, the bridge, the network of paths at Murgia Timone, the rock church of San Falcione and the shuttle to the viewpoint.
Let us be plain: anyone arriving at Porta Pistola expecting simply to walk down, the way you could until yesterday, meets a gate and a fare. The figures are in the practical section.
Practical information
Details checked on 6 September 2026 on the sites of Oltre l’Arte, of the Murgia Materana park authority and of the CEA of Matera. Prices and hours change: check again before you travel.
Careful: the sources on the trail do not agree. The frequently asked questions page of the CEA of Matera still gives it as closed to walkers, while the park authority sells the ticket for it. The Jazzo Gattini visitor centre changed management in February 2026, and the CEA page is very likely out of date: check the day before.
Where I would start
If you have a single day, the three-church ticket in the Sassi is the best way to understand how carved architecture works, and the Madonna del Latte alone is worth the climb to Santa Lucia.
If you have two days, I would give the second to the Murgia, because that is where you see the landscape these churches were made for: an inhabited canyon, where every wall has a door. And if time is short but the appetite for frescoes is not, the best alternative is not in town but fourteen kilometres away, in the Crypt of Original Sin.
For the whole picture of the city my guide on what to see in Matera remains the starting point, and to understand the houses the people who used these churches lived in, there is the article on the Sassi and the cave house.
Photographs: the Monterrone spur by Bernard Gagnon (CC BY 4.0), Santa Lucia alle Malve and San Pietro Barisano by Diego Baglieri, the suspension bridge by Benjamin Smith (CC BY-SA 4.0), from Wikimedia Commons.
