Matera cave houses and rock churches
What a Sassi cave house looks like inside, the four cave-house museums, the main rock churches, photo rules, and which Matera tours go inside which.
A cave house, or casa grotta, is a home dug back into the soft rock of the Sassi with a built front wall, and the ones you can visit today are furnished as families kept them before the districts were emptied in the 1950s. Matera has four separate cave-house museums with four different tickets, plus about 150 rock-cut places of worship in the city and its surrounding territory, according to the park authority. Most two-hour guided walks take you inside one cave house and one rock church, and which ones you get depends on the tour.
The most-reviewed walk on this site, the Matera: Sassi Tour with Cave House and Rupestrian Church, costs $33 and is rated 4.7 from 7,953 GetYourGuide reviews. Its listing includes a cave house museum (the Casa Grotta Narrante in its itinerary) and the rock church of Sant’Antonio Abate.
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What a cave house is and what you see inside
UNESCO describes the earliest houses of the Sassi as simple caves closed off by a wall of blocks cut from the rock, on the two slopes of Sasso Caveoso and Sasso Barisano. Over the centuries more than a thousand dwellings, shops and workshops grew out of the same rock. The Civita, the ridge between the two districts where the Cathedral stands, was the first inhabited core.
Inside a furnished cave house museum you see one family’s home laid out with period furniture, tools and household objects, which several tour listings call the home of the peasant civilization. Some include a cistern for collecting rainwater. Expect a visit of 10 to 30 minutes, depending on the venue and the tour.
The point of the visit is the living conditions. The Sassi were inhabited until the 1950s, when a 1952 law began moving well over ten thousand people to new districts such as La Martella, Venusio and Picciano. People began returning from the 1980s. A furnished cave house shows you, in one room or a few, how a family lived before that move. UNESCO’s description calls the Sassi “the most outstanding, intact example of a troglodyte settlement in the Mediterranean region”, first occupied in the Paleolithic.
Expect steps. The Casa Grotta di Vico Solitario’s own accessibility page says its caves are reached by a staircase and asks visitors with certain disabilities to contact it in advance.
The four cave-house museums, kept apart
The names overlap, and tour listings add their own versions, so it helps to know the four venues as separate places.
Casa Grotta di Vico Solitario, at Vico Solitario 11 in Sasso Caveoso, is the best-documented. It has been open to the public since 1977, one of the first cave-house museums. The full ticket is €8 from 4 April 2026 and gives you four caves: the house itself (about 15 minutes), the Neviera, a natural cave where a 30-minute film runs, and the Sant’Agostino rock church. You follow an audio guide by scanning a QR code. Children 10 and under enter free.
Casa Grotta Narrante is on Via Madonna delle Virtù and has its own site, which quotes Carlo Levi on first seeing Matera. It does not publish its price or hours. This is the cave house named in the itineraries of the most-reviewed walk and of the Open Top Bus Tour with Entrance to Casa Grotta and the Panoramic Tuk-Tuk Tour.
The Antica Casa Grotta on Via Fiorentini is run by Oltre l’Arte, the cooperative behind the Diocese’s rock churches. It costs €2 and opens daily from 9:00 to 19:00.
The Vicinato a Pozzo, also an Oltre l’Arte site, costs €8 and opens daily from 9:30 (last entry 18:00). A vicinato is a cluster of neighboring homes that lived as one community; Adriano Olivetti used this one as a model of community living for the new village of La Martella.
Casa Noha, run by FAI in the Civita, is a fifth stop of a different kind: part of a 16th-century residence carved into the tuff, visited through an immersive video (€7). It is not a furnished peasant cave house.
Several tours name their cave house in ways that match none of these exactly (“Casa Grotta Sassi di Matera”, “Del Vicinato cave house”, “Casa Grotta museum”). If a particular venue matters to you, check the voucher or ask the operator before you book.
The rock churches you can enter
Inside the Sassi, three rock-church sites sell timed tickets through Oltre l’Arte: €4.50 for one, €8 for two, €10 for all three. Book a date and time; the tickets are non-refundable.
Santa Maria de Idris and San Giovanni in Monterrone share one ticket and one rock, the Monterrone spur near San Pietro Caveoso. Santa Maria de Idris dates from the 13th to 15th centuries, with a facade rebuilt in the 15th century after a collapse. San Giovanni in Monterrone was cut in the 12th and 13th centuries and holds frescoes from the 12th to the 17th. The two were joined in the early 1800s, work that destroyed many frescoes. Open daily 9:30-19:30.
Santa Lucia alle Malve is described by Oltre l’Arte as the first female Benedictine monastic settlement, from the 8th century. Look for the Madonna del Latte fresco (about 1270) and San Michele (about 1250). Open daily 9:30-19:30.
San Pietro Barisano is the largest rock church in Matera. What you see is mostly an 18th-century rebuild with a 1755 facade, and many of its artworks were stolen or damaged in the 1960s and 1970s. An old city page says it cannot be visited; it is open daily 10:00-19:00 (last entry 18:50).
Two more complexes appear on tour itineraries without an official ticket price or published hours. Madonna delle Virtù with San Nicola dei Greci is where The Passion of the Christ filmed the Last Supper. Sant’Antonio Abate is the church included in the most-reviewed walk. Our James Bond and film locations guide covers the film sites.
Across the gorge on the Murgia plateau, the churches of San Falcione and Madonna delle Tre Porte are visited with a park ticket; see our sunset tour page.
Dress as you would for any Italian church, with shoulders and knees covered. These are consecrated churches.
Photos inside
The Casa Grotta di Vico Solitario allows personal photos and video with non-professional equipment at any time; professional shoots need written permission 30 days ahead. The rock churches publish no single rule. Flash and tripods are commonly restricted, so ask at the entrance before you take pictures. In the park churches, do not touch the frescoes. One private tour, the 3-hour Full Sassi Guided Tour Idris Church & Tasting, lists video recording as not allowed.
Which tours go inside which
Every tour below lists its entries in the includes. Where the listing does not name the cave house or church, the table says so.
| Tour | Price | Cave house | Rock church |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sassi Tour with Cave House and Rupestrian Church | $33 | Cave house museum (Casa Grotta Narrante in the itinerary) | Sant’Antonio Abate |
| Tour of the Sassi with iconic rock-cut churches | $39 | A furnished vicinato cave house and the Museum of Peasant Civilization | Santa Maria de Idris and San Giovanni in Monterrone |
| Guided City Center Tour with Cave Churches and Houses | $39 | Del Vicinato cave house | Santa Maria de Idris and San Giovanni in Monterrone |
| Guided Walking Tour with Cave House/Church | $34 | One entry: a furnished cave house or a frescoed rock church (not named) | See cave house column |
| Walking Tour with Cave House and Church Entry | $90 | A cave house museum (not named) | A rupestrian church (not named) |
| Sassi Walking Tour, Premium Guide | $34 | None included | Santa Lucia alle Malve |
| Sassi Tour with Giulio | $32 | A cave dwelling with cistern (not named) | A rupestrian church (not named) |
For the Monterrone churches, the two Passi nei Sassi walks are the pair to compare: the Tour of the Sassi with iconic rock-cut churches (4.7 from 1,568 reviews) adds a museum, and the Guided City Center Tour with Cave Churches & Houses (4.7 from 200) runs at 10:30 and 15:00 and finishes at Piazzetta Pascoli. Both cost $39.
The Guided Walking Tour with Cave House/Church ($34, 4.8 from 575) promises one of the two, so book it if the walk matters more to you than a specific interior.
The Walking Tour with Cave House and Church Entry costs $90, takes 2.5 hours and sells as a private booking for your group, with the top rating among the tours on this site (5.0 from 54 reviews).
If stairs are the problem, a few vehicle tours still take you inside. The $22 open-top bus includes the Casa Grotta Narrante, and the Guided Tour by Ape Calessino ($112, 4.9 from 28) includes the Santa Maria de Idris complex and a cave house with a licensed guide. Compare them on our tuk-tuk page and open-top bus page.
Seeing them on your own
You can visit every venue above without a guide. All three Oltre l’Arte churches plus the Casa Grotta di Vico Solitario come to €18 at full price, and children up to 10 go free at both. The tickets and prices guide lists every ticket, the timed-booking rules and the multi-site passes.
Going alone suits you if you have read up already and want time inside each church. A guide adds the stories behind the rooms, and the guided group rate at Oltre l’Arte sites is lower than the price you pay at the door. A common complaint in lower-rated tour reviews is that the guide was hard to hear in a large group, so ask whether the operator uses headsets if that bothers you.
To book the most-reviewed walk, use the date checker near the top of this page. To compare every format, read which Matera Sassi tour to book, or go back to the Matera Sassi tours homepage.
Book Your Walk Through the Sassi
Two hours with a licensed guide, a cave house and a rock-cut church, with free cancellation up to 24 hours before the tour.
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