Basilicata Geography, Climate & Nature

Basilicata occupies the instep of Italy's boot, bordered by Campania, Puglia, and Calabria, and is unusual among Italian regions for having coastlines on two separate seas: a short, cliff-lined stretch of the Tyrrhenian Sea around Maratea, and a longer, flatter Ionian Sea coast around Metaponto.

Between the two coasts, the region is dominated by mountains and hills -- the Appennino Lucano runs through the interior, while Monte Vulture, an extinct volcano in the north, gives its name to the region's best-known wine country. To the south, Pollino National Park, Italy's largest, straddles the border with Calabria. The Dolomiti Lucane, a cluster of steep sandstone towers around Castelmezzano and Pietrapertosa, form one of the region's most distinctive landscapes despite sharing a name with the much larger Dolomites in the north.

Basilicata's climate varies with both elevation and which coast is closer.

The coasts -- Maratea on the Tyrrhenian and Metaponto on the Ionian -- have a typical Mediterranean climate, with hot, dry summers and mild winters.

The mountainous interior, including the Appennino Lucano and the Pollino massif to the south, is considerably cooler and wetter, with real winter cold and occasional snow at higher elevations -- Matera itself, on a plateau between the two extremes, has hot summers and cool, damp winters.

Two national parks and a coastal wetland

Basilicata shares the Pollino National Park, the largest protected area in Italy, with Calabria along its southern border, and holds the Appennino Lucano National Park in its centre. Together they cover a substantial share of the region and protect a landscape that runs from beech and silver fir forest down through Mediterranean scrub to the coast.

Pollino's emblem is the Bosnian pine, a gnarled high-altitude conifer that reaches the western limit of its range here and grows nowhere else in Italy in any number. Individual trees on the exposed ridges are among the oldest living things in the country.

On the Ionian coast, the Bosco Pantano di Policoro preserves a fragment of the lowland forest and marsh that once lined this shore before it was drained for agriculture. Inland, the gravine — deep limestone ravines cut into the Murgia plateau around Matera — hold their own microclimates, sheltering plants and birds that the surrounding dry uplands do not.

Wolves, raptors and the Ionian shore

The Apennine wolf is present across the Pollino and Appennino Lucano massifs, recovered from near-extinction in the twentieth century and now a stable if rarely seen resident. Roe deer and wild boar are common throughout the forested interior, and the wild boar population is abundant enough to be a working problem for farmers.

Golden eagles nest on the higher crags, and the gravine around Matera support lesser kestrels, which colonise the old town itself in summer — the birds wheeling over the Sassi at dusk are one of the more reliable wildlife sights in the region. Peregrines and Egyptian vultures also use the ravine cliffs.

At Policoro, the coastal woodland and the mouth of the Sinni shelter otters, one of the more secure populations in southern Italy, and the beaches nearby are a nesting site for loggerhead turtles, monitored each summer by a local turtle rescue centre.