It’s all happening in Marino this weekend – wine literally flows freely from the town’s main fountain.  If you didn’t know about the annual Sagra dell’uva, you may be forgiven for thinking that a miracle is happening before your eyes!

During Marino’s 3-day festival this weekend, wine instead of water flows from the public fountain so that visitors can taste Marino’s famous wine. The city’s main fountain and the balconies of local houses are decorated with colorful flowers and lights.  Apart from the highlight event of free-flowing wine, the festival includes a street procession, display of period costumes, music and many other festivities.

To find out more about Marino’s Sagra dell’uva, read our blog HERE.

Travel Signposts Blog

Through the immortal love story of Romeo and Juliet Shakespeare has given Verona perennial fame. Many travellers in the Veneto region flock to Verona to see the famous Balcony of Juliet.

However, there’s very much more to Verona than just the tragic story of Romeo and Juliet. Verona is the second biggest city in the Veneto region after Venice, and one of the most prosperous in northern Italy. Within its historical centre, there are many magnificent and well preserved Roman ruins whose quality is second only to Rome.

Read More about Verona’s attractions
Read More about Romeo and Juliet in Verona
See what Verona is like in Travel Signposts Verona gallery

Travel Signposts Blog

Whereas in the northern part of Italy, we have Milano, one of the main centers of high fashion in the world, far away, towards the southern spur of the country can be found the town of Matera whose citizens used to live in cave dwellings up to the 1970′s.

Matera, a southern province of Basilicata, is perched on the edge of a deep ravine.  The town is divided into a bustling upper district and the quieter lower Sassi district.  The caves of the Sassi district is the most outstanding, intact example of a troglodyte settlement in the Mediterranean region, which is why it gained  UNESCO World Heritage status in 1993.  The first inhabited zone dates from the Palaeolithic, while later settlements illustrate a number of significant stages in human history.

It is believed that such caves provided refuge for the monks from Eastern Anatolia from the 8th – 13th centuries. They were taken over by peasants in the 15th century, but by the 18th century some of these caves had evolved into fairly grand mansions and convents.  Unfortunately, by the 1950s the Sassi district fell back in status and was overtaken by squalor and poverty.

Between the 1950s and the 1970s, when Sassi district’s 15,000 inhabitants were forcibly relocated in public housing developments on the outskirts of town, the cave dwellings were entirely without modern conveniences.  Italy was undergoing its postwar economic boom phase at the time, and the image of agricultural laborers living in caves without sanitation did not sit well with the country’s new sense of propriety.

By the mid-1990s, however, local activists were pressing for a review of Matera’s underground heritage.  There was a realization of the value of the warren of abandoned dwellings, as well as the numerous rock-hewn churches, many of them embellished with Byzantine paintings. When the Sassi district gained World Heritage listing, opportunistic people started buying up abandoned buildings and their caves, or restoring what they found beneath their own homes.

Today the district is humming with life again. Small hotels, bed-and-breakfasts, wine bars and restaurants as well as an impressive Museum of Contemporary Sculpture have sprung up in great settings with ample caves have been immaculately cleaned out and furnished, yet still maintaining its archaic mystery. A prime example of this is the La Casa di Lucio Hotel.  Comprising ten rooms and two suites in east-facing caves, their innermost reaches must once have been the sanctum sanctorum of burial chambers. 

Matera is a fascinating place and if you get the opportunity, do visit it.

Helen

Travel Signposts Blog